Data from: Special delivery: scavengers direct seed dispersal towards ungulate carcasses

• Main Authors: Steyaert, Sam, Frank, Shane, Puliti, Stefano, Badia, Rudi, Arnberg, Mie, Beardsley, Jack, Økelsrud, Asle, Blaalid, Rakel
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) 2018
• Subjects: Life sciences; medicine and health care; scavengers; endozoochory; Rangifer tarandus; directed seed dispersal; Empetrum nigrum; carrion ecology; geo; envir; Norway; Crowberry; Tundra
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h3c55cc

Cadaver decomposition-islands around animal carcasses can facilitate establishment of various plant life. Facultative scavengers have great potential for endozoochory, and often aggregate around carcasses. Hence, they may disperse plant seeds that they ingest across the landscape towards cadaver decomposition-islands. Here, we demonstrate this novel mechanism along a gradient of wild tundra reindeer carcasses. First, we show that the spatial distribution of scavenger feces (birds and foxes) was concentrated around carcasses. Second, feces of the predominant scavengers (corvids) commonly contained viable seeds of crowberry, a keystone species of the alpine tundra with predominantly vegetative reproduction. We suggest that cadaver decomposition-islands function as endpoints for directed endozoochory by scavengers. Such a mechanism could be especially beneficial for species that rely on small scale disturbances in soil and vegetation, such as several Nordic berry-producing species with cryptic generative reproduction. ESM_DRYAD_special_delivery_dataThe text file contains count data of bird (A) and mammal (M) feces, and presence or absence (Rp) of rodent fecal pellet groups at 75 1*1m survey plots distributed over a reindeer mass die-off (N = 323) site in Hardangervidda, Norway. 'Car_den' refers to carcass density (per m2), followed by a numeric indicating the search radius of the density estimator. 'Carc_dist' refers to the distance of each survey plot to the nearest carcass. POINT_X and POINT_Y are the encrypted coordinates of the survey plots.