Reid's Paradox of Rapid Plant Migration

Abstract

The oak, to gain its present most northerly position in North Britain after being driven out by the cold probably had to travel fully six hundred miles, and this without external aid would take something like a million years. (Reid 1899) B iologists have long regarded the natural dispersal of large seeds as an impediment to plant range expansion after glacial periods. Global maps predicting biome distributions under future climate change scenarios (e.g., VEMAP 1995) are now prompting ecologists to think about the dispers al problem: If rapid climate change or habitat de-