Fruit-frugivore interactions in a Malagasy littoral forest - Universiteit ...

PREFACE
Preface
This work brings together the main data collected during a 14-month field research in the
littoral forest of Sainte Luce, south-east Madagascar. Nearly all chapters have been
written to be suitable for publication and can as such be read independently from each
other. Overlap in the introduction, materials and methods sections of the different papers
was therefore unavoidable. In the different chapters distinct sub-samples from the fruit
database and phenological data were used depending on the research question under
consideration.
The work can be subdivided into three major sections: the introduction, the main section
containing five chapters and the conclusion. The introduction situates the main topic of
this work, describes the study site and the goal of this study. It further gives the outline of
the thesis. At the time of compiling this thesis one chapter has been published (Chapter
3a), one is in course of publication (Chapter 4) and four are being reviewed (Chapter 1, 2,
3, 3b). Chapter 5 gives an overview of the conservation issues in the littoral forest and
outlines possible applications, which will be used for conservation suggestions in a later
publication. Finally the conclusion links all chapters together, summarizing the most
relevant findings of this study.
Unfortunately the four year period was too limited to integrate all collected data into this
work. It will therefore not finish with this doctoral study. Other parts of my work such as
the more experimental preliminary work on seed predation and germination have been
presented during conferences in the form of oral and poster contributions: the British
Ecological Society (BES) meeting in Reading in 2001 (Bollen and Van Elsacker 2001),
the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) meeting in Panama 2002
(Bollen et al. 2002; Bollen and Van Elsacker 2002b), the ATBC meeting in Aberdeen
2003 (Bollen and Van Elsacker 2003) and the Benelux Congress of Zoology in Antwerp
(Bollen and Van Elsacker 2002c). A lecture given at the University of professional
education Larenstein in the Netherlands as part of a course on Tropical Ecology
completes this list. As I work with the Centre for Research and Conservation, which is
based at the Antwerp Zoo, there were several occasions on which written and oral media
on this seed dispersal project were presented to a larger audience (Zoo Magazine,
Course Primatology, Op de Koffie, Save the Bonobos, Africamatters).
5