TY - JOUR
T1 - Employing plant functional groups to advance seed dispersal ecology and conservation
AU - Aslan, Clare
AU - Beckman, Noelle G.
AU - Rogers, Haldre S.
AU - Bronstein, Judie
AU - Zurell, Damaris
AU - Hartig, Florian
AU - Shea, Katriona
AU - Pejchar, Liba
AU - Neubert, Mike
AU - Poulsen, John
AU - HilleRisLambers, Janneke
AU - Miriti, Maria
AU - Loiselle, Bette
AU - Effiom, Edu
AU - Zambrano, Jenny
AU - Schupp, Geno
AU - Pufal, Gesine
AU - Johnson, Jeremy
AU - Bullock, James M.
AU - Brodie, Jedediah
AU - Bruna, Emilio
AU - Cantrell, Robert Stephen
AU - Decker, Robin
AU - Fricke, Evan
AU - Gurski, Katie
AU - Hastings, Alan
AU - Kogan, Oleg
AU - Razafindratsima, Onja
AU - Sandor, Manette
AU - Schreiber, Sebastian
AU - Snell, Rebecca
AU - Strickland, Christopher
AU - Zhou, Ying
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Annals of Botany Company. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
PY - 2019/3/1
Y1 - 2019/3/1
N2 - Seed dispersal enables plants to reach hospitable germination sites and escape natural enemies. Understanding when and how much seed dispersal matters to plant fitness is critical for understanding plant population and community dynamics. At the same time, the complexity of factors that determine if a seed will be successfully dispersed and subsequently develop into a reproductive plant is daunting. Quantifying all factors that may influence seed dispersal effectiveness for any potential seed-vector relationship would require an unrealistically large amount of time, materials and financial resources. On the other hand, being able to make dispersal predictions is critical for predicting whether single species and entire ecosystems will be resilient to global change. Building on current frameworks, we here posit that seed dispersal ecology should adopt plant functional groups as analytical units to reduce this complexity to manageable levels. Functional groups can be used to distinguish, for their constituent species, whether it matters (i) if seeds are dispersed, (ii) into what context they are dispersed and (iii) what vectors disperse them. To avoid overgeneralization, we propose that the utility of these functional groups may be assessed by generating predictions based on the groups and then testing those predictions against species-specific data. We suggest that data collection and analysis can then be guided by robust functional group definitions. Generalizing across similar species in this way could help us to better understand the population and community dynamics of plants and tackle the complexity of seed dispersal as well as its disruption.
AB - Seed dispersal enables plants to reach hospitable germination sites and escape natural enemies. Understanding when and how much seed dispersal matters to plant fitness is critical for understanding plant population and community dynamics. At the same time, the complexity of factors that determine if a seed will be successfully dispersed and subsequently develop into a reproductive plant is daunting. Quantifying all factors that may influence seed dispersal effectiveness for any potential seed-vector relationship would require an unrealistically large amount of time, materials and financial resources. On the other hand, being able to make dispersal predictions is critical for predicting whether single species and entire ecosystems will be resilient to global change. Building on current frameworks, we here posit that seed dispersal ecology should adopt plant functional groups as analytical units to reduce this complexity to manageable levels. Functional groups can be used to distinguish, for their constituent species, whether it matters (i) if seeds are dispersed, (ii) into what context they are dispersed and (iii) what vectors disperse them. To avoid overgeneralization, we propose that the utility of these functional groups may be assessed by generating predictions based on the groups and then testing those predictions against species-specific data. We suggest that data collection and analysis can then be guided by robust functional group definitions. Generalizing across similar species in this way could help us to better understand the population and community dynamics of plants and tackle the complexity of seed dispersal as well as its disruption.
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U2 - 10.1093/aobpla/plz006
DO - 10.1093/aobpla/plz006
M3 - Article
C2 - 30895154
AN - SCOPUS:85067091794
SN - 2041-2851
VL - 11
JO - AoB PLANTS
JF - AoB PLANTS
IS - 2
M1 - plz007
ER -