How seeds disperse depend upon their fruit. Some fruit are tasty, some are sticky, some float, some sink. Each of these adaptations dictate how seeds (and plants) disperse to new areas which is super important when climate fluctuations make old habitats inhospitable.

Our latest work aimed to go beyond fruit dispersal adaptations to build a simpler model of species occurrence across the Malesian islands. Instead of assigning fruit types or dispersal mechanism to species (which is fraught with difficulty) we measured fruit size and tested a simple hypothesis that smaller fruit will better disperse as they can be eaten by small and big animals who travel, poo and bobs your uncle.

What we found is that the story is slightly more complex than that. With smaller fruits only being more widely distributed in more mountainous islands and big fruits in wetter areas.

OA article here https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ppp3.10348