Figure captions
Figure 1: By affecting the number and the traits of dispersal
units produced by plant species dispersed by animals, pollen limitation
can indirectly interfere with the foraging decisions of disperser
animals and, consequently, with their behavior when exploring fruiting
plants (yellow boxes). These disperser behaviors are directly related to
the outcome of some of the main factors determining the quantitative
(orange boxes) and qualitative components (green boxes) of Seed
Dispersal effectiveness for animal-dispersed plants. In this scheme,
seed vigor is the only plant trait that can directly affect the
qualitative component of SDE, without interfering with the disperser
behavior. Despite it, this trait was included in the scheme for the sake
of clarity of our rationale.
Figure 2: Hypothetical dispersal kernel plots representing the
effect of pollen limitation on crop size and its consequences for the
distance of seeds dispersed by animals. Since it is a theoretical model,
it represents the expected seed dispersal pattern regardless the metric
unit used to measure seed dispersal distance in study cases. According
to Knight et al. (2005), pollen-limited plants produced 75% fewer
fruits than not pollen-limited ones. For this reason, we created two
data sets simulating this mean effect on plant seed set – 1000 seeds
for pollen-limited plants (A) and 250 for not pollen-limited ones (B).
Then, we modeled the expected distribution of these seeds over a
distance gradient following a probability-density function.
Figure 3 : General flowchart representing a simplified version
of our PL-SDE framework, its context-dependent nature, and its
implications to populational eco-evolutionary processes. In the dashed
boxes, we pointed out the main extrinsic effects that can drive the
outcome of PL-SDE effects and its consequences to animal-dispersed
plants. We also highlight the existence of ecological and evolutionary
consequences of PL-SDE links to plant demography and plant floral
traits, respectively.