It has been hypothesized that biotic interactions are stronger towards lower latitudes and elevations. However, results vary among interaction systems and experimental protocols. Our goal was to examine the validity of this prediction by using a standardized method to investigate seed–animal interaction. We assessed removal by animals for 40960 seeds belonging to 32 non-native tree species along an elevation gradient from 600 m to 2910 m on Mount Victoria (Nat Ma Taung), western Myanmar. We analyzed the elevational trends of seed removal at both individual seed level (probability of depot encounter, proportion of seeds removed after encounter and total proportion of seeds removed) and community level (Shannon diversity and species evenness indices). The dry and wet seasons had opposite relationships between seed removal and elevation,
i.e. hump-shaped in the dry season and U-shaped in the wet season. Individual plant species displayed almost all possible patterns: U-shaped and hump-shaped, monotonic decrease and increase, and elevation-independent patterns. As a consequence of the hump-shaped seed removal pattern with elevation in the dry season, the diversity and evenness of surviving seeds showed U-shaped patterns. Our study shows that elevational trends in seed–animal interactions do not follow a constant rule, but differ between seasons and among species, suggesting that a one-off survey with few species might give misleading information on overall macroecological patterns. Future studies of trends in biotic interactions along gradients should bear this in mind.

Details about how the dataset was collected, please see the published paper (DOI: 10.1111/ecog.05385).

Obs: the observation ID of our 8192 seed releasing depots in total

elevation: the elevation of a depot where it was released

latitude and longtitude: the GPS position of a depot where it was released

transect: the transect ID in each elevation

depot:  the depot ID in each transect

speciesID: the species ID for each species

Species name: the scientific name for each species

Harvest: number of seeds removed by animals at each depot

Left: number of seeds left intact in situ at each depot

Day: survey time (i.e., Day 1 or Day 2)

Season: season when the experiments were conducted, dry (dry season) and wet (wet season)