Life history traits that promote population divergence in seed plants (Q1)
Among phylogenetic multiple regressions with the four life history traits (models 1–4, Table 1), model 4 was the best-fit, indicating that mating system, growth form, pollination mode and seed dispersal mode all influence FST (AIC=–482.3). However, the performance of model 4 was almost indistinguishable from that of model 3 (ΔAIC=2.2), which only differed in the lack of the factor seed dispersal mode. Further evidence for the relative unimportance of seed dispersal mode can be seen in the fact that adding seed dispersal mode to model 1 (which only has mating system and growth form) results in much less improvement of fit (models 2 vs. 1, ΔAIC=2.5) than adding pollination mode (models 3 vs. 1, ΔAIC=16.6).