ABSTRACT

Organisms’ dispersal ability, the spatial scale over which they relocate themselves or their offspring, is a fundamental life-history trait that determines a population’s spatial pattern with respect to kin, conspecific and heterospecific competitors, and environmental gradients. Long-distance dispersal determines species’ ability to recolonize new habitats after large-scale disturbance (Clark, 1998), while mediumdistance dispersal affects their ability to coexist in relatively stable habitats (e.g., via competition-colonization tradeoffs (Holmes and Wilson, 1998)).