HUH Research Fellow Jenifer de Carvalho Lopes and colleagues have a new publication in the Annals of Botany, "Dispersal from Africa to the Neotropics was followed by multiple transitions across Neotropical biomes facilitated by frugivores." The authors use tribe Bocageeae (Annonaceae), a predominantly Neotropical plant group distributed across several present-day Neotropical biomes and with an African-American disjunction, to investigate long-distance dispersal mediated by frugivorous animals at both intercontinental and intracontinental scales. They conclude that inter- and intracontinental dispersal may not rely on a single dispersal syndrome or guild, but more on the availability of frugivorous lineages for seed dispersal.

Jenifer de Carvalho Lopes, Luiz Henrique M. Fonseca, David M Johnson, Federico Luebert, Nancy Murray, Francis J Nge, Carlos Rodrigues-Vaz, Vincent Soulé, Renske E Onstein, Lúcia G Lohmann, Thomas L P Couvreur, Dispersal from Africa to the Neotropics was followed by multiple transitions across Neotropical biomes facilitated by frugivores, Annals of Botany, 2023;, mcad175, https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcad175