LONG-DISTANCE WIND DISPERSAL OF TREE SEEDS

Long-distance seed dispersal figures prominently in most plant conservation biology arguments, yet we possess little more than anecdotes concerning the relationship among deposition (seeds/m(2)), source strength (seeds/m(2)), and distance. In this paper we derive two simple models for long-distance deposition. The models are tested at the scale of 100-1600 m from the sourer and found to be within 5-fold of the observed deposition. There is no discernable decline in deposition for the range 300-1600 m. While we hesitate to extend model predictions to greater distances, both the models and the empirical results allow us to assert that rare wind-dispersed species in woodlots (dispersal distance around 1 km) are effectively isolated from one another at the temporal scale of 1000 years.