D3: The Dispersal and Diaspore Database – Baseline data and statistics on seed dispersal

By Christina Hintze, F. Heydel, Christina Hoppe, Sarah Cunze, A. König, Oliver Tackenberg. 2013

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Seed dispersal is hard to measure, and there is still a lack of knowledge about dispersal-related traits of plant species. Therefore, we developed D 3 , the Dispersal and Diaspore Database (available at www.seed-dispersal.info ), which aims at simplifying ecological and evolutionary analyses by providing and integrating various items related to seed dispersal: empirical studies, functional traits, image analyses and ranking indices (quantifying the adaptation to dispersal modes). Currently, the database includes data for more than 5000 taxa and 33 items as well as digital images of diaspores (i.e. the dispersal units), seeds, fruits and infructescences. The included items cover common traits like diaspore mass, size, shape, terminal velocity and seed number per diaspore. Furthermore, we present newly or further developed items like ecomorphological categorizations of the diaspore and fruit as well as information from literature on prevailing dispersal modes. Finally, we introduce several items which are not covered in other databases yet: surface structure and form of the diaspore, the exposure of the diaspores in the infructescence and dispersal rankings. Dispersal rankings allow estimations of how well certain species are adapted to a specific dispersal mode in comparison to a larger species set. They are calculated as the percentile rank of an indicator of species’ dispersal potential in relation to a larger species set. Especially for the new and further developed items we outline the basic concepts in detail, describe the measurement and categorization methods and show how to interpret and integrate these data for single species as well as for larger species sets. Thereby, we calculate baseline statistics of seed dispersal of the Central European flora. We found that diaspores of 72% of the taxa show specializations related to long-distance dispersal, i.e. most often elongated appendages or nutrient-rich tissues. Diaspore masses, sizes and terminal velocities vary over several orders of magnitude and can be approximated by lognormal distributions.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac6c33c71c8cf21223810797a79f7af6b72e6a6a

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

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Citations in the corpus

Does the biogeographic origin of species matter? Ecological effects of native and non‐native species and the use of origin to guide management (2016, background): “Humanmediated dispersal seems particularly important for some plant families (e.g. Fabaceae and Asteraceae in the Central European flora (Hintze et al. 2013)), but the traits associated with human-mediated dispersal are currently unclear.”
Clonal growth and sexual reproduction: tradeoffs and environmental constraints (2015, background): “It makes it possible to forage for limiting resources, share them among connected ramets, and escape sites where some limiting resource might have been exhausted (Hutchings and de Kroon 1994).”
Seed dispersal by dabbling ducks: an overlooked dispersal pathway for a broad spectrum of plant species (2016, background): “…in general reviews of dispersal by animals or in overviews of dispersal syndromes (e.g. Wang & Smith 2002; Ozinga et al. 2004; McConkey et al. 2012; Hintze et al. 2013), and there is an implicit assumption in the literature that waterbirds are relevant as dispersal vectors only in aquatic or…”
Effects of disturbance frequency and severity on plant traits: An assessment across a temperate flora (2018, methodology): “…productivity Name Units Source Life- history category Categorical Klimešová et al. (2017) Specific leaf area mm2/mg Kleyer et al. (2008) Seed mass mg Hintze et al. (2013) Height at maturity m Kubát et al. (2002) Bud bank size Number of buds Klimešová et al. (2017) Spreading distance m Klimešová et…”
Running off the road: roadside non-native plants invading mountain vegetation (2018, methodology): “…traits: Grime strategy (Grime 1977) obtained from the BiolFlor database (Klotz et al. 2002) and Ellenberg indicator values for moisture, light and temperature (Ellenberg and Leuschner 2010); and (3) seed characters relating to dispersal, obtained from the D3 database (Hintze et al. 2013) (Table 2).”
Plant dispersal syndromes are unreliable, especially for predicting zoochory and long‐distance dispersal (2021, methodology): “Similarly, Hintze et al. (2013) concluded that, compared to other dispersal modes, endozoochory is particularly unimportant for European Cyperaceae, when the opposite is true (Ridley 1930, Soons et al. 2016).”
The compadre Plant Matrix Database: an open online repository for plant demography (2015, unknown): “Alterna-tively, it is possible to derive geographic distances among populations based on GPS coordinates provided here and integrate that information with dispersal kernels (Bullock et al. 2012; Hintze et al. 2013) for a better understanding of population or meta-population dynamics.”
Regeneration: an overlooked aspect of trait‐based plant community assembly models (2016, background): “More traits are characterized in recent dispersal trait data bases, for example D3: Dispersal and Diaspore Database, (Hintze et al. 2013), which includes an array of dispersal traits for a regional set of species and offers a starting point for trait collection in other geographic areas.”