Assessing the efficacy of population-level models of mast seeding

We compare five models of mast seeding: the well-established resource-based model of Isagi et al. (J Theor Biol 187:231–239, 1997) and Satake and Iwasa (J Theor Biol 203:63–84, 2000), the regression based model of Masaka and Maguchi (Ann Bot 88:1049–1055, 2001), the more recent Delta temperature (ΔT) model of Kelly et al. (Ecol Lett 16:90–98, 2013), the resource model of Pearse et al. (Oikos 123:179–184, 2014) and the long-used temperature model. We discuss fitting methods for each model and compare the theoretical overlap between the models. Population level data from 28 seed sets and corresponding mean summer temperature are used and the error of each model is compared. On average, the ΔT model provides a better fit than the other models tested.