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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2021

Ungulate-mediated seed dispersal consequences - moving backwards

Conséquences de la dispersion des plantes par les ongulés : approche rétrospective

Christophe Baltzinger

Résumé

Wild ungulates are long-distance dispersal (LDD) vectors for plants. According to their gut passage or fur retention time, each transported seed can reach any part of their home range, ranging from tens to hundreds of hectares. Additionally, seeds can be transferred through social interactions between conspecifics. Aside from dispersal, ungulates can also locally modify abiotic conditions for plant germination and subsequent growth. This holds true for both native and alien plants. However, proofs of LDD mediated by ungulates are rare, whereas up to 44 % of the accessible plants are dispersed either by endozoochory, fur- or hoof-epizoochory. Attempts to understand temporal changes in plant communities generally fail to identify ungulates and associated LDD as main drivers, and still recently concerning range dynamics of mountain plants. We thus wonder if we can detect recurrent and/or punctual LDD events explaining the current distribution of an expanding plant (i.e. winner species, increasing in frequency). Can we thus reconstruct its dispersal history? We have shown in the past the dramatic expansion of an epizoochorous plant in the presence of ungulates using resampled plots of vegetation and browsing scores on a systematic sampling network. There were also other winner species but with less spectacular colonisation pattern. Our objective is to provide more evidence to the role of large ungulates on plant LDD, testing historical ecology approaches on a pool of resampled datasets (e.g. forestREplot). This is a call for cooperation. We foresee the following successive steps: identify plants whose spatial distribution changed over time; compare their traits with traits involved in ungulate-mediated plant dispersal; guess the most parsimonious dispersal mechanism and propose a method to quantify the associated dispersal distances. Understanding current plant distribution patterns using backward approaches should help predict the role of ungulates in changing environments and in rewilding programs.
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Dates et versions

hal-03292698 , version 1 (20-07-2021)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03292698 , version 1

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Christophe Baltzinger. Ungulate-mediated seed dispersal consequences - moving backwards. Historical Ecology for the Future, May 2021, communication à distance, France. ⟨hal-03292698⟩
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