No abstract

Social Impact Statement In the face of the unprecedented rate of climate change, understanding whether plant species can track favourable climatic conditions is an urgent challenge. Recent independent studies suggest that the timing of fruiting (fruiting phenology) can strongly affect future vegetation dynamics and composition via direct seed dispersal. With comprehensive datasets on fruiting phenology, researchers may predict the impact of climate on the future of forests. Nevertheless, long‐term, broad‐scale, and taxonomically comprehensive datasets of fruiting phenology are still lacking, leaving us unprepared to understand the consequences of climate change on entire floras. We urge stronger collaboration networks to assemble broader, longer, and more comprehensive fruiting phenology datasets. Summary Climate change is altering species phenology but still with underrated consequences to their ecology and conservation. For example, the production of ripe fruits and the dispersal of their seeds by frugivores are likely critical for their ability to track suitable growing conditions under global warming. Specifically, recent independent studies suggested that migrant birds and mammals are important to facilitate plant spread towards higher (i.e., cooler) latitudes and higher elevations. Interestingly, these studies coincide that spring‐fruiting species will likely be particularly favoured, whereas autumn‐fruiting species might be largely dispersed to undesirable (i.e., even hotter) areas. These studies show that the timing of fruit production can have a critical impact on future forest composition as plant communities adapt to warmer, more extreme, and unpredictable climates. Unfortunately, comprehensive datasets on fruiting times are very scarce and often temporary, spatially, and taxonomically restricted (particularly when compared with flowering datasets), strongly hampering our capacity to predict the real impact of climate change on long‐term vegetation dynamics. Thus, we advocate for an urgent need for long‐term, broad‐scale, and taxonomically comprehensive datasets of fruiting phenology, and we point out some potential concrete steps towards this goal.

Rabbits have travelled with humans to the most remote archipelagos, having been introduced on at least 800 islands worldwide. This herbivore has caused a devastating effect on endemic insular plants, causing changes in species composition, cascading extinctions and disruption of native seed dispersal systems worldwide. However, its ecological impacts as disrupting native seed dispersal systems have not been studied from a holistic perspective in any of the archipelagos where rabbits were introduced. Here, we assess the role of rabbits as frugivores and seed-dispersers on the most extensive and diverse island of the Canary Archipelago, Tenerife, across its five main vegetation zones represented in an altitudinal gradient 0–3715 m a.s.l. To this end, 120 transects per vegetation zone were conducted (August 2020–November 2021) to collect fresh faecal samples from a total of 244 latrines. They consisted of 29,538 droppings in which we found seeds from 73 plant species, 29 of which were identified to species level (13 endemic, eight natives and eight introduced by humans). About 70% of the seeds were identified as fleshy-fruited plant species while the remaining nine were dry fruits. Of the former, only nine showed a percentage of intact seeds greater than 75%, another nine species between 50 and 75%, and three lower than 50%. The digestive effect of rabbits on seedling emergence was generally low, compared to that produced by native seed dispersers. Since fleshy-fruited plants and rabbits have not been linked in their evolutionary history in the Canaries, the former seems to have their own legitimate seed dispersers.