Geoökologisches Kolloquium WS 2002/03

All lecture dates

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Dr. Steve Higgins
UFZ-Centre of Environmental Research, Leipzig
Thursday, 07.11.2002 16:15 H6

Long Distance Dispersal and the rapid Migration of Plant Populations

Changes in the global environment are modifying the geographical Locations of habitats suitable for plant growth. The ability of plants to migrate to sites of suitable environmental quality will strongly influence future distributions of plant diversity. The importance of migration for future diversity has stimulated a revival in migration research. Recent empirical and theoretical work has shown that long distance dispersal (LDD) is the key processes that drives migration rates. However, LDD has turned out to be both theoretically and empirically challenging to study. Theoretically LDD has been tricky to deal with because the classic models of plant migration treated dispersal as a diffusion process, whereas in reality seed dispersal is poorly approximated as a diffusion process. Empirically LDD is difficult to describe because LDD events are so infrequent and large in scale that they are rarely observed. Recently there have been some useful advances in both migration models and empirical techniques for describing LDD. While these new developments have significantly improved our understanding of LDD they have also revealed that even if we have perfect information on LDD, that the forecasts of migration rates will often be uncertain. This inherent uncertainty is caused be the overwhelming influence the stochastic nature of LDD.

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