Aim For tens of millions of years, herbivorous megafauna were abundant across the globe, fulfilling important ecological roles including seed dispersal. Megafruits are very large fruits that are dispersed most effectively by megafauna. However, megafruits also occur in ecosystems where megafauna are extinct or were never present, emphasizing our incomplete understanding of megafauna-megafruit relationships. Here we use the complex biogeography of tropical Asia to investigate how megafruit diversity and traits are associated with the diversity...

Large-scale reforestation can potentially bring both benefits and risks to the water cycle, which needs to be better quantified under future climates to inform reforestation decisions. We identified 477 water-insecure basins worldwide accounting for 44.6% (380.2 Mha) of the global reforestation potential. As many of these basins are in the Asia-Pacific, we used regional coupled land-climate modelling for the period 2041–2070 to reveal that reforestation increases evapotranspiration and precipitation for most water-insecure regions over the...

1. Protected Areas (PAs) are a cornerstone of global conservation strategies. PAs, however, are not equally effective for all threatened taxa, and it is important to understand taxa-specific effectiveness of PAs networks. 2. In this study we evaluate the role of the PAs network on the protection of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and their habitats in Southeast Asia’s Sundaic region. Since Asian elephants tend to prefer secondary forests or forest gaps, we predicted that PAs...

Diverse assemblages of seed-dispersing megafauna once existed in Asian rainforests, but are now almost solely represented by elephants. Asia’s rhinos persist in remnant, ecologically-extinct populations and the most threatened of these is the Sumatran rhino, Dicerorhinus sumatrensis. To understand the seed dispersal role of Sumatran rhinos, we consolidated information on fruit consumption, seed dispersal and fruit traits from a two-month field study (Sumatra), local ecological knowledge (Peninsular Malaysia), and published and unpublished accounts. We evaluated...