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.