The tolerance-fecundity trade-off and the maintenance of diversity in seed size.

ABSTRACT: Seed size commonly varies by five to six orders of magnitude among coexisting plant species, a pattern ecologists have long sought to explain. Because seed size trades off with seed number, small-seeded species clearly have the advantage in fecundity, but what is the countervailing advantage of large seeds? Higher competitive ability combined with strong competitive asymmetry can in theory allow coexistence through a competition-colonization trade-off, but empirical evidence is inconsistent with this mechanism. Instead, the key advantage of large seeds appears to be their tolerance of stresses such as shade or drought that are present in some but not all regeneration sites. Here I present a simple, analytically tractable model of species coexistence in heterogeneous habitats through a tole

SUBMITTER: Muller-Landau HC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2840174 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature