Dispersal in Plants: A Population Perspective

Dispersal in Plants. A Population Perspective. Roger Cousens, Calvin Dytham, and Richard Law. The first comprehensive treatment of plant.
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He has broad interests in ecological theory including plant community ecology and spatio-temporal processes in plant population dynamics. A vast literature on mating systems explores their evolution and how they influence population dynamics, gene flow, and adaptation. In comparison, the literature on seed dispersal, as opposed to pollen dispersal, is oddly scarce. Mathematical models of dispersal from the perspective of the population are explained clearly, but the non-mathematically inclined will find much of value.

Dispersal in Plants

Of particular value is the distinction between dispersal viewed by density and frequency distribution of distances travelled by seeds. Its useful structure recommends the book to a wide range of biologists, starting with graduates. Dispersal is a key element for survival in fluctuating and fragmented environments that threaten many parts of the world today, and this book therefore comes as a timely and relevant contribution in this context as well.

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To purchase, visit your preferred ebook provider. Oxford Scholarship Online This book is available as part of Oxford Scholarship Online - view abstracts and keywords at book and chapter level. Therefore the chapter discusses methods of how to get information on propagule dispersal in experimental and natural situations and how to summarize this information by means of mathematical models.

Finally, in the third part of the book, we learn about the consequences of dispersal for patterns and dynamics of populations and communities, and how environmental factors will shape dispersal on both a short and a long evolutionary run. In this part the full power of mathematical modelling begins to come into action, and it may be that readers will stop following the arguments after the first chapter at the latest.

Roger Cousens, Calvin Dytham, and Richard Law

But they should try to continue: Data are given, above all, in the form of point patterns, and methods for their interpretation are presented. We get answers to ecological questions, and at the same time we learn a lot about different modelling approaches in population ecology.

The chapter also points out limitations of modelling: The last two chapters of the third part supplement each other: The chapter on evolutionary problems includes a break in the argument: It should have been possible to discuss — as the preceding chapter shows — the processes acting in favour of dispersal at first along the same lines as the opposing processes and only then to introduce the additional action of genetic factors.

The book is written by three people: This coherence is supplemented by a very detailed subject index.


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The reader is helped by short summaries of each chapter and by transitions between the chapters, and one always knows where one is off to. As the authors admit, they present in the third part the main topics of their own research and these personal views make some disparities unavoidable. So, Reid's paradox is introduced twice, but such a repetition must be seen as a reverence to the great relevance of this phenomenon for dispersal research. In the very last chapter the authors come together in formulating priorities for future research, simply in the order of the chapters.

What are the implications of dispersal for those engaged in managing plant populations and communities? This is the first book for many yea This is the first book for many years to present a synthesis of research on dispersal and its implications for plant population dynamics. The book consists of three sections: Section A reviews information on the biological and environmental processes that determine the path of an individual dispersing propagule, usually a seed, and the theory that has been developed to predict these trajectories; Section B discusses the distributions of seeds resulting from dispersal from an entire plant, theoretical research predicting the shapes of these distributions and design issues for future dispersal studies; Section C explores the implications of dispersal for expansion of populations, structure within existing populations and communities, and the evolution of dispersal traits.

Dispersal in Plants: A Population Perspective

Roger Cousens, author University of Melbourne, Australia. Don't have an account? Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use for details see www.


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