Rapid deforestation has fragmented habitat across the landscape of Madagascar. To determine the effect of fragmentation on seed banks and the potential for forest regeneration, we sampled seed viability, density and diversity in 40 plots of 1 m in three habitat types: forest fragments, the near edge of continuous forest, and deforested savanna in a highly fragmented dry deciduous forest landsca...

Introduction Alliaria petiolata, an herbaceous plant, has invaded woodlands in North America. Its ecology has been thoroughly studied, but an overlooked aspect of its biology is seed dispersal distances and mechanisms. We measured seed dispersal distances in the field and tested if epizoochory is a potential mechanism for long-distance seed dispersal. Methods Dispersal distances were measured...

during last two decades studies on endozoochorous seed dispersal indicated that a large numbers of plant seeds are potentially dispersed and suceefully germinated via animal dung. however, very little is known about the relative importance of endozoochory in germination success of plant species in semi-steppe rangelands. in this paper we examined dung germinating seed content, seed deposition p...

Although there have been advances in methods for extracting information about dispersal processes, it is still very difficult to measure them. Predicting dispersal groups using single readily-measured traits would facilitate the emergence of instructive comparisons among ecological strategies of plants and offer a path towards improved synthesis across field experiments. The leaf-height-seed sc...

Seed dispersal by wind is a critical yet poorly understood process in tropical forest trees. How tree size and fecundity affect this process at the population level remains largely unknown because of insufficient replication across adults. We measured seed dispersal by the endangered neotropical timber species big-leaf mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla King, Meliaceae) in the Brazilian Amazon at ...

The astounding diversity of angiosperms, and their prevalence in most presentday terrestrial habitats, has often attracted the attention of evolutionary biologists, and a number of factors have been proposed to explain the success and extraordinary radiation of this group, particularly in relation to gymnosperms (see, e.g., stebbins 1974, 1981; Raven 1977; Regal 1977; Doyle 1978; Mulcahy 1979; ...

Seed dispersal has a powerful influence on population dynamics, genetic structuring, evolutionary rates, and community ecology. Yet, patterns of seed dispersal are difficult to measure due to methodological shortcomings in tracking dispersed seeds from sources of interest. Here we introduce a new method to track seed dispersal: stable isotope enrichment. It consists of leaf-feeding plants with ...

What happens to seeds once they have reached a surface – here referred to as post-dispersal seed fate (cf. Chambers and MacMahon, 1994) – is becoming an increasingly important question. A large body of literature is available evaluating postdispersal seed fate (reviewed in Hulme, 1998, 2002; Crawley, 2000; Moles and Westoby, 2003; see Hulme and Kollmann, Chapter 2, this volume; Vander Wall and ...

19 The negative correlation between dispersal and establishment appears to be well documented 20 in the plant literature; smaller seeds tend to disperse better but germinate less well, and 21 produce smaller seedlings. However, because dispersal capacity is often quantified using 22 proxies, such as the settling velocity of wind-dispersed seeds, little is known about the exact 23 shape of this ...