Oak habitat recovery on California's largest islands: Scenarios for the role of corvid seed dispersal

Abstract

Seed dispersal by birds is central to the passive restoration of many tree communities. Reintroduction of extinct seed dispersers can therefore restore degraded forests and woodlands. To test this, we constructed a spatially explicit simulation model, parameterized with field data, to consider the effect of different seed dispersal scenarios on the extent of oak populations. We applied the model to two islands in California's Channel Islands National Park (USA), one of which has lost a key seed disperser. We used an ensemble modelling approach to simulate island scrub oak (Quercus pacifica) demography. The model was developed and trained to recreate known population changes over a 20-year pe..