Litter removal reduces seed predation in restored prairies during times when seed predation would otherwise be high

Observing Seed Removal: Remote Video Monitoring of Seed Selection, Predation and Dispersal

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 ...

Weed Seed Predation in Agricultural Fields

Weed communities in agronomic fields are dominated by annual species. Summer annuals initiate growth each spring from seeds found in the upper soil profile (Figure 1). In most fields, a small percentage of the emerging plants survive and contribute new seeds to the soil seedbank. Historically, most research of the annual weed life cycle has focused on seed dormancy and emergence (A), effect of ...

Predispersal Seed Predation, Postdispersal Seed Predation and Competition in the Recruitment of Seedlings of a Native Thistle in Sandhills Prairie

Assessing ant seed predation in threatened plants: a case study

Erodium paularense is a threatened plant species that is subject to seed predation by the granivorous ant Messor capitatus. In this paper we assessed the intensity and pattern of ant seed predation and looked for possible adaptive strategies at the seed and plant levels to cope with this predation. Seed predation was estimated in 1997 and 1998 at the population level by comparing total seed pro...

Weed seed loss due to predation in Michigan maize fields

The influence of weed seed predation by invertebrates and vertebrates was examined in relation to distance from hedgerows in maize fields of southwestern Michigan. Experiments were conducted in spring and winter and included five common weed species, i.e., velvet-leaf (Abutilon theophrasti), redroot pigweed (Amaranthus retroflexus), common lamb's-quarters (Chenopodium album), fall panicum (Pani...