Estimating the fruit dispersion of anemochorous forest trees

This paper studies the problem of modelling fruit dispersal of anemochorous forest trees by the statistical analysis of fruit collections in traps. The statistical model of fruit dispersion and the choice of trap positions turn out to be very important. It is shown that the lognormal distribution of 'fruit-tree' distance seems to be of great practical interest. The trap positions have considerable influence on the precision of the estimates, particularly on the total number of fruits per tree. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.