Drivers of plant species’ potential to spread: the importance of demography versus seed dispersal

Understanding the ability of plants to spread is important for assessing conservation strategies, landscape dynamics, invasiveness and ability to cope with climate change. While long-distance seed dispersal is often viewed as a key process in population spread, the importance of inter-specific variation in demography is less explored. Indeed, the relative importance of demography vs seed dispersal in determining population spread is still little understood. We modelled species’ potential for population spread in terms of annual migration rates for a set of species inhabiting dry grasslands of central Europe. Simultaneously, we estimated the importance of demographic (population growth rate) vs long-distance dispersal (99th percentile dispersal distance) characteristics for among-species differences in modelled population spread. In addition, we assessed how well simple proxy measures related to demography (the number and survival of seedlings, the survival of flowering individuals) and ...