Projects

Birds provide multiple ecosystem services, but one of the most important is their role in plant dispersal. In recent decades, seed dispersal studies have focused on frugivory and seed caching, but some papers showed that granivorous waterbirds have an even more important role in plant dispersal. Waterbirds disperse plants in two ways: in their guts, named endozoochory and on their outsides, called epizoochory, with the former being more important. Our research project targets to investigate seed dispersal potential of Icelandic waterbirds during their breeding season and at the beginning of the migration. This is especially important, since most Icelandic birds fly to the European mainland without stopovers, potentially transporting Icelandic plant propagules within their digestive tracts. Our study will explore the long distance dispersal potential of plants by different waterbirds. Moreover we will investigate the waterbird-mediated dispersal of invasive plants, of which our current knowledge is very limited. Our results will help to predict changes in the ecosystem and to protect and conserve important habitats on the long term.