Noelle Beckman

• PhD, Ecology, Evolution, & Behavior
• Professor (Associate) at Utah State University

Although dispersal is generally viewed as a crucial determinant for the fitness of any organism, our understanding of its role in the persistence and spread of plant populations remains incomplete. Generalizing and predicting dispersal processes are challenging due to context dependence of seed dispersal, environmental heterogeneity, and interdepen...

Despite the importance of seed dispersal as a driving process behind plant community assembly, our understanding of the role of seed dispersal in plant population persistence and spread remains incomplete. As a result, our ability to predict the effects of global change on plant populations is hampered. We need to better understand the fundamental...

Plants produce an enormous diversity of secondary metabolites, but the evolutionary mechanisms that maintain this diversity are still unclear. The interaction diversity hypothesis suggests that complex chemical phenotypes are maintained because different metabolites benefit plants in different pairwise interactions with a diversity of other organis...

Frugivore movement plays a critical role in animal‐mediated seed dispersal. Frugivores utilize resources that are heterogeneously distributed in the landscape and execute complex movement to exploit these resources. Employing the ‘movement ecology paradigm', we discuss the drivers behind frugivore movement, categorize movement into canonical activi...

Seed dispersal, or the movement of diaspores away from the parent location, is a multiscale, multipartner process that depends on the interaction of plant life history with vector movement and the environment. Seed dispersal underpins many important plant ecological and evolutionary processes such as gene flow, population dynamics, range expansion,...

Plants produce an astonishingly diverse array of specialized metabolites. A crucial step in understanding the origin of such chemodiversity is describing how chemodiversity manifests across the spatial and ontogenetic scales relevant to plant–biotic interactions. Focusing on 21 sympatric species of Psychotria and Palicourea sensu lato (Rubiaceae),...

The loss of large frugivorous birds can impact their plant partners through loss of ecological services, like long‐distance dispersal of seeds. Yet, interaction rewiring, or the redistribution of interactions among remaining bird species, might help counteract the loss of long‐distance dispersal from large bird extinctions. Here, we tested if rewir...

p dir="ltr">The majority of woody plant species on Barro Colorado Island (BCI) are dispersed by animals. We review research relevant to understanding the processes and consequences of seed dispersal on BCI, focusing on primary seed dispersal by animals. We first review patterns of primary seed dispersal and then discuss studies that quantify the ef...

p dir="ltr">Among plants with animal-dispersed fruits, the phytochemical traits of fruit play a number of key ecological roles, including attracting mutualistic seed dispersers. Beginning on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), expanding across the tropics, and finally returning to BCI, we trace and review the research that has elucidated the ecological an...

Differences in seed dispersal patterns can alter plant distributions, species persistence, plant community composition, and biotic carbon sequestered within a landscape. Though carnivorans are known to be frugivorous, their contribution to seed dispersal is marginally studied, especially compared to other sympatric dispersers such as passerines. Th...

Alterations of the landscape following agricultural expansion and intensification affect animal movement patterns in the resulting mosaic of fragments and surrounding matrix. Here, we analyze the observed movement patterns of 34 individuals from nine tropical bird species from a rapidly changing agricultural landscape in Kenya. We deconstructed the...

Premise of the study: The specialized metabolites of plants are recognized as key chemical traits in mediating the ecology and evolution of sundry plant-biotic interactions, from pollination to seed predation. Intra- and interspecific patterns of specialized metabolite diversity have been studied extensively in leaves, but the diverse biotic inter...

Mounting evidence suggests that plant–soil feedbacks (PSF) may determine plant community structure. However, we still have a poor understanding of how predictions from short‐term PSF experiments compare with outcomes of long‐term field experiments involving competing plants. We conducted a reciprocal greenhouse experiment to examine how the growth...

Premise of the study The specialized metabolites of plants are recognized as key chemical traits in mediating the ecology and evolution of sundry plant-biotic interactions, from pollination to seed predation. Intra- and interspecific patterns of specialized metabolite diversity have been studied extensively in leaves, but the diverse biotic interac...

Seed dispersal is critical to the ecological performance of sexually reproducing plant species and the communities that they form. The Mammalian order Carnivora provide valuable and effective seed dispersal services but tend to be overlooked in much of the seed dispersal literature. Here we review the literature on the role of Carnivorans in seed d...

Members of the order Carnivora are a unique and important seed disperser who consume and deposit undamaged seeds while providing regular long‐distance seed dispersal opportunities. Some members of Carnivora, such as coyotes (Canis latrans), are undergoing range expansions which may help the plant species they consume colonize new locations or repla...

Explaining the stability of human populations provides knowledge for understanding the resilience of human societies to environmental change. Here, we use archaeological radiocarbon records to evaluate a hypothesis drawn from resilience thinking that may explain the stability of human populations: Faced with long-term increases in population densit...

We review recent ecological research on functional traits that can aid selection of tree species for restoration by aerial seeding. A major barrier in selecting species for restoration of hyperdiverse tropical forests is a lack of silvicultural and ecological information. Functional traits give insight into the potential performance of tree species...

Explaining variation in human population density constitutes a basic research problem in human ecology and archaeological science. To contribute to this basic research problem, we build a graphic model and conduct a global analysis of the effects of ecological variables, controlling for technological differences, on human population density. Our re...

Ongoing habitat loss and fragmentation alter the functional diversity of forests. Generalising the magnitude of change in functional diversity of fragmented landscapes and its drivers is challenging because of the multiple scales at which landscape fragmentation takes place. Here we propose a multi-scale approach to determine whether fragmentation...

Specialized pathogens are thought to maintain plant community diversity; however, most ecological studies treat pathogens as a black box. Here we develop a theoretical model to test how the impact of specialized pathogens changes when plant resistance genes (R-genes) mediate susceptibility. This work synthesizes two major hypotheses: the gene-for-g...

Dispersal and fecundity are two fundamental traits underlying the spread of populations. Using integral difference equation models, we examine how individual variation in these fundamental traits and the heritability of these traits influence rates of spatial spread of populations along a one-dimensional transect. Using a mixture of analytic and nu...

Questions We asked: (a) whether the strength of conspecific and heterospecific neighborhood crowding effects on focal tree survival and growth vary with neighborhood radii; and (b) if the relative strength of the effect of neighborhood interactions on tree growth and survival varies with neighborhood scale. Location Luquillo Forest Dynamics Plot,...

Patterns of seed dispersal and seed mortality influence the spatial structure of plant communities and the local coexistence of competing species. Most seeds are dispersed in proximity to the parent tree, where mortality is also expected to be the highest, because of competition with siblings or the attraction of natural enemies. Whereas distance‐d...

Habitat loss and fragmentation result in significant landscape changes that ultimately affect plant diversity and add uncertainty to how natural areas will respond to future global change. This uncertainty is important given that the loss of biodiversity often includes losing key ecosystem functions. Few studies have explored the effects of landsca...

There is growing realization that intraspecific variation in seed dispersal can have important ecological and evolutionary consequences. However, we do not have a good understanding of the drivers or causes of intraspecific variation in dispersal, how strong an effect these drivers have, and how widespread they are across dispersal modes. As a firs...

The distribution and abundance of plants across the world depends in part on their ability to move, which is commonly characterized by a dispersal kernel. For seeds, the total dispersal kernel (TDK) describes the combined influence of all primary, secondary, and higher-order dispersal vectors on the overall dispersal kernel for a plant individual,...

A bstract Dispersal and fecundity are two fundamental traits underlying the spread of populations. Using integral difference equation models, we examine how individual variation in these fundamental traits and the heritability of these traits influence rates of spatial spread of populations along a one-dimensional transect. Using a mixture of analy...

As the single opportunity for plants to move, seed dispersal has an important impact on plant fitness, species distributions, and patterns of biodiversity. However, models that predict dynamics such as risk of extinction, range shifts, and biodiversity loss tend to rely on the mean value of parameters and rarely incorporate realistic dispersal mech...

As the single opportunity for plants to move, seed dispersal has an important impact on plant fitness, species distributions and patterns of biodiversity. However, models that predict dynamics such as risk of extinction, range shifts and biodiversity loss tend to rely on the mean value of parameters and rarely incorporate realistic dispersal mechan...

Seed dispersal enables plants to reach hospitable germination sites and escape natural enemies. Understanding when and how much seed dispersal matters to plant fitness is critical for understanding plant population and community dynamics. At the same time, the complexity of factors that determine if a seed will be successfully dispersed and subsequ...

Environment and human land‐use both shape forest composition. Abiotic conditions sift tree species from a regional pool via functional traits that influence species’ suitability to the local environment. In addition, human land‐use can modify species distributions and change functional diversity of forests. However, it is unclear how environment an...

Seed dispersal is an essential, yet often overlooked process in plant ecology and evolution, affecting adaptation capacity, population persistence and invasiveness. A species’ ability to disperse is expected to covary with other life‐history traits to form dispersal syndromes. Dispersal might be linked to the rate of life history, fecundity or gene...

Pre‐dispersal seed predation can greatly reduce crop size affecting recruitment success. In addition, non‐fatal damage by seed predators may allow infection by fungi responsible for post‐dispersal seed losses. The objectives of this study were (1) to quantify pre‐dispersal seed predation and fungal infection in a Neotropical tree species, Luehea se...

Background/Question/Methods Determining the mechanisms underlying the assembly of diverse communities continues to be a central goal of ecology. While taxonomic diversity constitute the basis of most research in plant community ecology and are key to understanding biodiversity assembly mechanisms, the growing interest in using functional and phyl...

Background/Question/Methods Extirpation of vertebrates by human activity results in "empty forests", with disrupted ecological processes, including seed dispersal of plants. Although seed dispersal is typically modeled as monotonically decreasing with distance from the tree, vertebrates disperse seeds in clumps to preferred areas. These seeds mus...

The Janzen–Connell hypothesis proposes that specialist natural enemies, such as herbivores and pathogens, maintain diversity in plant communities by reducing survival rates of conspecific seeds and seedlings located close to reproductive adults or in areas of high conspecific density. Variation in the strength of distance- and density-dependent eff...

Forests are major components of the global carbon cycle, providing substantial feedback to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Our ability to understand and predict changes in the forest carbon cycle-particularly net primary productivity and carbon storage-increasingly relies on models that represent biological processes across several scale...

Seed dispersal sets the stage for the suite of biotic and abiotic interactions that determine the fate of individual seeds. In this review, we first focus on how dispersal influences the ‘seedscape’, or the combination of abiotic and biotic factors that affect the probability of recruitment once a seed has reached its final location. We review rece...

Numerous observational studies have documented conspecific negative density-dependence that is consistent with the Janzen-Connell Hypothesis (JCH) of diversity maintenance. However, there have been few experimental tests of a central prediction of the JCH: that removing host-specific enemies should lead to greater increases in per capita recruitmen...

Background/Question/Methods Forests are experiencing global declines in vertebrate abundances, many of which are important seed dispersers of plants. Declines in seed disperser abundances will reduce dispersal of vertebrate-dispersed plants compared to abiotically dispersed plants with consequences for seedling spatial patterns and diversity. See...

Secondary compounds in fruit mediate interactions with natural enemies and seed dispersers, influencing plant survival and species distributions. The functions of secondary metabolites in plant defenses have been well-studied in green tissues, but not in reproductive structures of plants. In this study, the distribution of toxicity within plants wa...

Summary of generalized linear mixed models for Artemia franciscana survivorship in fruit extract and Fusarium sp. hyphal growth on fruit extract relative to negative controls for mature fruit of eleven species. (PDF)

Background/Question/Methods Pre-dispersal seed predation is a major cause of seed losses in tropical plant species. Pre-dispersal seed predators are often insects, but also may also include vertebrates such as monkeys and parrots. Fungal pathogens have also been directly implicated in seed losses at the pre-dispersal stage, but successful fungal...

1. Seed dispersal and natural enemies both influence spatial patterns of seedlings, which in turn influence future abiotic and biotic interactions, with consequences for plant populations, distributions and diversity. Clumped seed deposition is common, especially for vertebrate-dispersed seeds, and has the potential to significantly affect interact...

The importance of vertebrates, invertebrates, and pathogens for plant communities has long been recognized, but their absolute and relative importance in early recruitment of multiple coexisting tropical plant species has not been quantified. Further, little is known about the relationship of fruit traits to seed mortality due to natural enemies in...

Background/Question/Methods The selective pressure of mutualists and antagonists has resulted in a myriad of plant adaptations, including nutritional fruit traits in response to seed dispersers and defenses in response to seed predators and pathogens. In fruit, chemical defenses are expected to be higher in immature compared to mature fruit, where...

Background/Question/Methods: Interspecific variation in seed predation and pathogen attack is related to variation in plant life history traits, including fruit morphology and chemical defenses. The objective of this study is to quantify how variation of fruit traits among tree species influences vertebrate and insect seed predation as well as path...

A filamentous virus identified in coleus (Coleus x hybrida) in Minnesota and New York was found to cause veinal necrosis in coleus, although this symptom was observed only under certain conditions. The virus was transmitted readily by mechanical inoculation to coleus and Nicotiana spp. and was not transmitted by Myzus persicae. The particles of the...

Many of the mammals undergoing drastic declines in tropical forests worldwide are important seed dispersers and seed predators, and thus changes in mammal communities due to hunting will affect plant recruitment. It has been hypothesized that larger-seeded species will suffer greater reductions in seed removal and thus greater increases in predispe...

We introduce a special section that addresses the bushmeat or wild meat crisis, its direct impact on game species, and its indirect impact on plants in tropical forests.

While many studies have examined the barrier effects of large rivers on animal dispersal and gene flow, few studies have considered the barrier effects of small streams. We used displacement experiments and analyses of genetic population structure to examine the effects of first-order and second-order streams on the dispersal of terrestrial red-bac...

Roads can fragment animal populations by disrupting movement among formerly continuous habitats. Although models have demonstrated that disrupted movement can contribute to long-term extinction, there are few empirical data on the effects of roads on animal movement. We used displacement and homing experiments to determine whether forest roads are...

One of the major effects of deforestation is the creation of numerous edge zones where remaining forest meets nonforest habitat. At this interface, edge effects on forest habitats can include altered abiotic conditions, changes in rates of competition and predation, and altered community structure. While the edge effects resulting from clear-cuts a...

Although the importance of omnivory in food webs has been established, the community niche of generalist arthropod predators such as praying mantids is usually assumed to be at most bitrophic, feeding on herbivores and other carnivores. As with most predators, mantids often are food limited in nature. Flowering plants in their environment offer man...