Notícias
Study summarizes seed fall patterns in the Atlantic Forest
“Seed rain” is the term experts use to describe the flow of seeds that fall in a given location. Studies on this phenomenon typically focus on relatively small, defined areas, but a collaborative effort by 60 researchers from various Brazilian institutions and states has, for the first time, collected and synthesized data on seed rain between fragments of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. The article resulting from this study was published in the Journal of Ecology on May 6, 2026.
The results indicate that landscape characteristics, such as latitude, precipitation, and forest cover, among others, allow for the prediction of large-scale seed dispersal patterns between fragments of the Atlantic Forest—a pattern that could not be detected in more localized studies.
Seed rain is a fundamental process in the formation of plant communities and forest regeneration. Hence the importance of understanding how it occurs in the Atlantic Forest, one of the most diverse and most threatened forests in the world, of which only about 23 to 24% of forest cover remains, mostly scattered across small, isolated fragments.
“Our results highlight forest cover, in conjunction with precipitation, as a key factor for seed diversity in fragmented tropical forests, although fragmented sites may also exhibit greater seed availability—likely due to the presence of pioneer species associated with forest edges. Understanding these patterns is essential for predicting how forests regenerate and how these highly fragmented ecosystems may change in the future,” explains the article’s first author, Luis Felipe Daibes de Andrade, a researcher at the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden.
To conduct this analysis of a vast ecosystem like the Atlantic Forest, the researchers compiled a database of data collected between 1987 and 2021, based on 1,905 seed traps across 52 study patches. More than 1.3 million seeds were collected, and 1,029 taxons were identified at least to the family level. The co-authors were responsible for field collections over the years and provided the raw datasets used in the analyses. The study was funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (Fapesp) and is the result of Luís Daibes’s postdoctoral research at the São Paulo State University (Unesp Rio Claro).