Extended dispersal kernels in a changing world: insights from statistics of extremes

Dispersal ecology is a topical discipline that involves understanding and predicting plant community responses to multiple drivers of global change. Propagule movements that entail long-distance dispersal (LDD) events are crucial for plants to reach and colonize suitable sites across fragmented landscapes. Yet, LDD events are extremely rare, and thus, obtaining reliable estimates of the maximum distances that propagules move across and of their frequency has been a long-lasting challenge in plant ecology. Recent advances in dispersal ecology have provided reliable records of dispersal distances, but they remain confined to focal populations, limiting our ability to infer the frequency and actual extent of LDD events across landscapes. In this study, we view LDD events as extreme values of a dispersal function, and we apply statistics of extremes to derive the frequency and extent of LDD events of simulated and empirical data sets. We first briefly explain the rationale behind statistic...