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Defaunation Reduces Sequestration via Selective Deforestation
In simple English, when you remove large bodied seed eating animals from a forest, the trees with the largest seeds are reduced over time, and that negatively affects the ability of the forest to capture and store CO2. The larger seeds tend to be produced by larger trees, and these do not spread without animal action.
Science Advances [sciencemag.org] reports that:
Defaunation is a human-induced process that significantly erodes key ecosystem services and functions through direct and indirect cascading effects. Defaunation has been shown to affect pollination, seed dispersal, pest control, nutrient cycling, decomposition, water quality, and soil erosion. Now, we have evidence that defaunation will, over time, result in significantly decreased carbon storage ecosystem service in tropical forests where animal-dispersed plants are abundant and crucially dependent on large frugivores.
In hardwood forests this effect is less pronounced, but in typical softwood forests in warm areas the removal of the large seed eating animals can have a relatively large effect on changing the forest structure.
This tends to reduce the number of large trees, replacing them with smaller species that rot quickly at end of life and return carbon to the environment much more quickly than large trees.
The study is a computer simulation, with no actual on the ground measurements or biological studies.
