A herbivore is an animal anatomically and physiologically evolved to feed on plants, especially upon vascular tissues such as foliage, fruits or seeds, as the main component of its diet. These more broadly also encompass animals that eat non-vascular autotrophs such as mosses, algae and lichens, but do not include those feeding on decomposed plant matters or macrofungi.
In the fields of horticulture and botany, the term deciduous means "falling off at maturity" and "tending to fall off", in reference to trees and shrubs that seasonally shed leaves, usually in the autumn; to the shedding of petals, after flowering; and to the shedding of ripe fruit. The antonym of deciduous in the botanical sense is evergreen.
Heliconia is a genus of flowering plants in the monotypic family Heliconiaceae. Most of the 194 known species are native to the tropical Americas, but a few are indigenous to certain islands of the western Pacific and Maluku in Indonesia. Many species of Heliconia are found in the tropical forests of these regions. Most species are listed as either vulnerable or data deficient by the IUCN Red List of threatened species. Several species are widely cultivated as ornamentals, and a few are naturalized in Florida, Gambia, and Thailand.
Phenology is the study of periodic events in biological life cycles and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate, as well as habitat factors.
A frugivore is an animal that thrives mostly on raw fruits or succulent fruit-like produce of plants such as roots, shoots, nuts and seeds. Approximately 20% of mammalian herbivores eat fruit. Frugivores are highly dependent on the abundance and nutritional composition of fruits. Frugivores can benefit or hinder fruit-producing plants by either dispersing or destroying their seeds through digestion. When both the fruit-producing plant and the frugivore benefit by fruit-eating behavior the interaction is a form of mutualism.
Daniel Hunt Janzen is an American evolutionary ecologist and conservationist. He divides his time between his professorship in biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the DiMaura Professor of Conservation Biology, and his research and field work in Costa Rica.
Autumn leaf color is a phenomenon that affects the normally green leaves of many deciduous trees and shrubs by which they take on, during a few weeks in the autumn season, various shades of yellow, orange, red, purple, and brown. The phenomenon is commonly called autumn colours or autumn foliage in British English and fall colors, fall foliage, or simply foliage in American English.
Temperate deciduous or temperate broad-leaf forests are a variety of temperate forest 'dominated' by deciduous trees that lose their leaves each winter. They represent one of Earth's major biomes, making up 9.69% of global land area. These forests are found in areas with distinct seasonal variation that cycle through warm, moist summers, cold winters, and moderate fall and spring seasons. They are most commonly found in the Northern Hemisphere, with particularly large regions in eastern North America, East Asia, and a large portion of Europe, though smaller regions of temperate deciduous forests are also located in South America. Examples of trees typically growing in the Northern Hemisphere's deciduous forests include oak, maple, basswood, beech and elm, while in the Southern Hemisphere, trees of the genus Nothofagus dominate this type of forest. Temperate deciduous forests provide several unique ecosystem services, including habitats for diverse wildlife, and they face a set of natural and human-induced disturbances that regularly alter their structure.
The maroon langur, maroon leaf monkey, or red leaf monkey is a member of the family Cercopithecidae. It is found on the southeast Asian island of Borneo and the nearby smaller Karimata. P. rubicunda mostly live in forests at altitudes below 2,000 m. They feed on leaves, seeds, and fruits.
Vateria indica, the white dammar, is a species of tree in the family Dipterocarpaceae. It is endemic to the Western Ghats mountains in India. It is threatened by habitat loss. It is a large canopy or emergent tree frequent in tropical wet evergreen forests of the low and mid-elevations.
Browsing is a type of herbivory in which a herbivore feeds on leaves, soft shoots, or fruits of high-growing, generally woody plants such as shrubs. This is contrasted with grazing, usually associated with animals feeding on grass or other lower vegetations. Alternatively, grazers are animals eating mainly grass, and browsers are animals eating mainly non-grasses, which include both woody and herbaceous dicots. In either case, an example of this dichotomy are goats and sheep.
The smooth helmeted iguana, also known as the helmeted iguana, the helmeted basilisk, the elegant helmeted lizard, and several other common names, is a species of Basilisk and a New World lizard in the family Corytophanidae. The species is native to southern Mexico, Central America, and northwestern South America.
Oreocallis is a South American plant genus in the family Proteaceae. There is only one species, Oreocallis grandiflora, which is native to mountainous regions in Peru and Ecuador.
Simarouba amara is a species of tree in the family Simaroubaceae, found in the rainforests and savannahs of South and Central America and the Caribbean. It was first described by Aubl. in French Guiana in 1775 and is one of six species of Simarouba. The tree is evergreen, but produces a new set of leaves once a year. It requires relatively high levels of light to grow and grows rapidly in these conditions, but lives for a relatively short time. In Panama, it flowers during the dry season in February and March, whereas in Costa Rica, where there is no dry season it flowers later, between March and July. As the species is dioecious, the trees are either male or female and only produce male or female flowers. The small yellow flowers are thought to be pollinated by insects, the resulting fruits are dispersed by animals including monkeys, birds and fruit-eating bats and the seeds are also dispersed by leaf cutter ants.
Atta colombica is one of 47 species of leafcutter ants. This species is part of the Attini tribe.
Platypodium elegans, the graceful platypodium, is a large leguminous tree found in the Neotropics that forms part of the forest canopy. It was first described by Julius Rudolph Theodor Vogel in 1837 and is the type species of the genus. The tree has been known to grow up to 30 metres in height and have a trunk with a diameter up to 1 m at breast height. Its trunk has large holes in it, sometimes making it possible to see through the trunk. The holes provide a habitat for giant damselflies and other insects both when alive and once the tree has died and fallen over. It has compound leaves each of which is made up of 10–20 leaflets. Three new chemical compounds have been isolated from the leaves and they form part of the diet of several monkeys and the squirrel Sciurus ingrami. In Panama it flowers from April to June, the flowers contain only four ovules, but normally only one of these reaches maturity forming a winged seed pod around 10 cm long and weighing 2 g. During the dry season around a year after the flowers are fertilised, the seeds are dispersed by the wind and the tree loses it leaves. The seeds are eaten by agoutis and by bruchid beetle larvae. The majority of seedlings are killed by damping off fungi in the first few months of growth, with seedlings that grow nearer the parent trees being more likely to die. The seedlings are relatively unable to survive in deep shade compared to other species in the same habitat. Various epiphytes are known to grow on P. elegans with the cactus Epiphyllum phyllanthus being the most abundant in Panama. Despite having holes in its trunk which should encourage debris and seeds to collect, hemiepiphytes are relatively uncommon, meaning that animals are not attracted to it to feed and then defecate. It has no known uses in traditional medicine and although it can be used for timber, the wood is of poor quality.
Drought deciduous, or drought semi-deciduous plants refers to plants that shed their leaves during periods of drought or in the dry season. This phenomenon is a natural process of plants and is caused due to the limitation of water around the environment where the plant is situated. In the spectrum of botany, deciduous is defined as a certain plant species that carry out abscission, the shedding of leaves of a plant or tree either due to age or other factors that causes the plant to regard these leaves as useless or not worth keeping over the course of a year. Deciduous plants can also be categorised differently than their adaptation to drought or dry seasons, which can be temperate deciduous during cold seasons, and in contrast to evergreen plants which do not shed leaves annually, possessing green leaves throughout the year.
Phyllis Dewing Coley is a Biology professor currently teaching at the University of Utah. In 1996 she received the University's Distinguished Research Award. She has been a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute since 1995. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Drypetes wightii is an evergreen tree species endemic to the Western Ghats, India. The species is considered Vulnerable under the IUCN Redlist of Threatened Species.
John Massa Kasenene is a botanical and environmental ecologist, academic, scientist and academic administrator in Uganda. From 4 October 2022, he serves as the substantive Deputy Vice Chancellor of the Mountains of the Moon University (MMU), at that time, the tenth public university in the country.
