The global decline of mutualists such as pollinators and seed dispersers may cause negative direct and indirect impacts on biodiversity. Mutualistic network models used to understand the stability of mutualistic systems indicate that species with low partner diversity are most vulnerable to coextinction following mutualism disruption. However, existing models have not considered how species var...

Growing interest in spatial ecology is promoting new approaches to the study of seed dispersal, one of the key processes determining the spatial structure of plant populations. Seed-dispersion patterns vary among plant species, populations and individuals, at different distances from parents, different microsites and different times. Recent field studies have made progress in elucidating the me...

Habitat fragmentation threatens biodiversity by disrupting dispersal. The mechanisms and consequences of this disruption are controversial, primarily because most organisms are difficult to track. We examined the effect of habitat corridors on long-distance dispersal of seeds by birds, and tested whether small-scale (<20 meters) movements of birds could be scaled up to predict dispersal of seed...

1: This study investigated 15 coexisting dominant species in a humid subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forest in southwest China, consisting of long-lived pioneers and climax species occurring in natural and disturbed regimes. The authors hypothesized that there would be non-tradeoff scaling relationships between sprouting and seed size among species, with the aim of uncovering the ecological ...

Subjective decisions of thematic and spatial resolutions in characterizing environmental heterogeneity may affect the characterizations of spatial pattern and the simulation of occurrence and rate of ecological processes, and in turn, model-based tree species distribution. Thus, this study quantified the importance of thematic and spatial resolutions, and their interaction in predictions of tre...

Growth in seed dispersal studies has been fast-paced since the seed disperser effectiveness (SDE) framework was developed 17 yr ago. Thus, the time is ripe to revisit the framework in light of accumulated new insight. Here, we first present an overview of the framework, how it has been applied, and what we know and do not know. We then introduce the SDE landscape as the two-dimensional represen...

Recent evidence has suggested that clades of dioecious angiosperms have fewer extant species on average than those of cosexual (hermaphroditic and monoecious) relatives. Reasons for the decrease in speciation rates and/or increase in extinction rates are only beginning to be investigated. One possibility is that dioecious species suffer a competitive disadvantage with cosexuals because only hal...

Dispersal is a life-history trait affecting dynamics and persistence of populations; it evolves under various known selective pressures. Theoretical studies on dispersal typically assume 'natal dispersal', where individuals emigrate right after birth. But emigration may also occur during a later moment within a reproductive season ('breeding dispersal'). For example, some female butterflies fir...