Seed traits and phylogeny explain plants' geographic distribution

Abstract

Understanding the mechanisms that shape the geographic distribution of plant species is a central theme of biogeography. Although seed mass, seed dispersal mode and phylogeny have long been suspected to affect species distribution, the link between the sources of variation in these attributes and their effects on the distribution of seed plants are poorly documented. This study aims to quantify the joint effects of key seed traits and phylogeny on species distribution. We collected the seed mass and seed dispersal mode from 1426 species of seed plants representing 501 genera of 122 families and used 4 138 851 specimens to model species distributional range size. Phylogenetic generalized least-squares regression and variation partitioning were performed to estimate the effects of seed mass, seed dispersal mode and phylogeny on species distribution. We found that species distributional range size was significantly constrained by phylogeny. Seed mass and its intraspecific variation were also important in limiting species distribution, but their effects were different among species with different dispersal modes. Variation partitioning revealed that seed mass, seed mass variability, seed dispersal mode and phylogeny together explained 46.82 % of the variance in species range size. Although seed traits are not typically used to model the geographic distributions of seed plants, our study provides direct evidence showing seed mass, seed dispersal mode and phylogeny are important in explaining species geographic distribution. This finding underscores the necessity to include seed traits and the phylogenetic history of species in climate-based niche models for predicting the response of plant geographic distribution to climate change.