The relationship between seed mass and dispersal distance
has been quantified before, but only within single species, dispersal
syndromes or vegetation communities (Greene & Johnson
1993; Xiao, Zhang & Wang 2005; Muller-Landau et al.
2008). The cross-species relationship between seed mass and
dispersal distance was negative for 41 tropical tree species,
including wind-, ballistically and animal-dispersed species
(Muller-Landau et al. 2008). Within wind-dispersed species,
relationships between seed mass and dispersal capacity have
been negative for winged achenes (Greene & Johnson 1993)
and nonsignificant across seed-morphology types (Greene &
Johnson 1986). There was no relationship between maximum
dispersal distance and propagule mass for 320 species of passively
dispersed organisms (Jenkins et al. 2007), but this study
combined plants, marine larvae and pollen reproductive
bodies, making it impossible to identify the plant contribution.
Our study is the first to provide a large-scale, cross-species
quantification of the relationships between seed mass and dispersal
distance across and within seed dispersal syndromes.