"Scavenger vertebrate communities are responsible of important ecosystem functions, such as the removal of dead animals from the field, which reduces health risk. Previous studies have related the structure of these communities to the efficiency of carrion consumption and, therefore, to the role that these communities play in the ecosystem. This structure, in turn, is affected by the presence of certain species of scavengers (e.g., obligate scavengers or top predators) and by environmental conditions such as weather or disturbances of anthropogenic origin.
In this talk, I will explain how the richness and structure of large-scale scavenger vertebrate communities change under different environmental conditions and how these communities are affected by human disturbance and productivity. To do this, we collected information on vertebrate scavenger communities around the world and used network analysis to characterize the structure of these communities and relate this structure to climatic and ecological variables. We also identified species characteristics that make them important for maintaining community structure.