Defaunation & Seed Dispersal Collapse (2D Forest Plot)

Most tropical trees depend on animals to carry their seeds away from the parent canopy, and the biggest seeds have only the biggest animals as viable couriers. This simulator models a top-down forest plot where small birds, medium mammals and large frugivores (tapirs, hornbills, large primates) each disperse seeds up to a body-size-limited class, using a real exponential dispersal kernel and a Janzen-Connell escape-distance survival rule. Raise the hunting/habitat-pressure slider and watch defaunation strip out large-bodied dispersers first — large-seeded trees keep producing fruit but their recruitment rate collapses because nothing left in the forest can carry their seeds far enough to escape density-dependent mortality under the parent tree, the "empty forest syndrome" ecologists document in over-hunted reserves worldwide. Drag the map to pan and scroll to zoom; the strip chart below tracks recruitment rate and species diversity live.