Human activities have fundamental impacts on the distribution of species through altered land use, but also directly by dispersal of propagules. Rare long-distance dispersal events have a disproportionate importance for the spread of species including invasions. While it is widely accepted that humans may act as vectors of long-distance dispersal, there are few studies that quantify this process. We studied in detail a mechanism of human-mediated dispersal (HMD). For two plant species we measured, over a wide range of distances, how many seeds are carried by humans on shoes. While over half of the seeds fell off within 5 m, seeds were regularly still attached to shoes after 5 km. Semi-mechanistic models were fitted, and these suggested that long-distance dispersal on shoes is facilitated by decreasing seed detachment probability with distance. Mechanistic modelling showed that the primary vector, wind, was less important as an agent of long-distance dispersal, dispersing seeds less than 250 m. Full dispersal kernels were derived by combining the models for primary dispersal by wind and secondary dispersal by humans. These suggest that walking humans can disperse seeds to very long distances, up to at least 10 km, and provide some of the first quantified dispersal kernels for HMD.

Plants often show a patchy distribution. This can be related to the discontinuous distribution of environmental variables that define suitable habitat. Metapopulation theory suggests that additional patchiness may be caused by the dynamics of local extinctions and recolonisations. However, the contribution of these two mechanisms to explaining the observed patterns, and thus the applicability of metapopulation theory to plants remains controversial partly because population turnover may occur at long time-scales not usually covered by ecological studies. We analyzed the role of environmental variation and population turnover in determining the distribution of two Brassica species, an annual and a perennial, along 44 km of coastline in Dorset, UK. Mapped occurrence and abundance of both species in recent years was compared with distributions from a 70 yr-old dataset and a survey of present-day environmental parameters. Abiotic and vegetation parameters were correlated with the occurrence of both species in binary logistic regression models and explained spatial auto-correlation in the Brassica distributions. These regression models suggest that neither species is occupying all potential habitat in the region studied. The relationship between historical and present distributions differed between the species. While an historical signal was very weak in the annual B. nigra, it had a large influence in predicting the present distribution of the perennial B. oleracea. This suggests local extinction and colonisation events for B. nigra over the 70 yr period, but not for B. oleracea which showed little evidence of population turnover. Our results demonstrate that the consideration of large time-scales can reveal patterns of regional dynamics. We conclude that metapopulation dynamics might be possible for our annual but can be ruled out for our perennial study species over the past 70 yr. We argue that beyond this time-scale possible metapopulation dynamics may be overridden by faster processes of environmental change.

As anthropogenic impacts on the natural world escalate, there is increasing interest in the role of humans in dispersing seeds. But the consequences of this Human-Mediated Dispersal (HMD) on plant spatial dynamics are little studied. In this paper, we ask how secondary dispersal by HMD affects the dynamics of a natural plant metapopulation. In addition to dispersal between patches, we suggest within-patch processes can be critical. To address this, we assess how variation in local population dynamics, caused by small-scale disturbances, affects metapopulation size. We created an empirically based model with stochastic population dynamics and dispersal among patches, which represented a real-world, cliff-top metapopulation of wild cabbage Brassica oleracea. We collected demographic data from multiple populations by tagging plants over eight years. We assessed seed survival, and establishment and survival of seedlings in intact vegetation vs. small disturbances. We modeled primary dispersal by wind using field data and used experimental data on secondary HMD by hikers. We monitored occupancy patterns over a 14-yr period in the real metapopulation. Disturbance had large effects on local population growth rates, by increasing seedling establishment and survival. This meant that the modeled metapopulation grew in size only when the area disturbed in each patch was above 35%. In these growing metapopulations, although only 0.2% of seeds underwent HMD, this greatly enhanced metapopulation growth rates. Similarly, HMD allowed more colonizations in declining metapopulations under low disturbance, and this slowed the rate of decline. The real metapopulation showed patterns of varying patch occupancy over the survey years, which were related to habitat quality, but also positively to human activity along the cliffs, hinting at beneficial effects of humans. These findings illustrate that realistic changes to dispersal or demography, specifically by humans, can have fundamental effects on the viability of a species at the landscape scale.