Study
Mechanisms of mast seeding: resources, weather, cues, and selection
Pearse, Ian S.; Koenig, Walter D.; Kelly, Dave
New Phytologist, 2016
A review separating the proximate mechanisms of mast seeding — what makes a tree produce a huge crop in one year and almost none the next — from the ultimate explanations for why the behaviour is favoured, and assessing the evidence for each independently.
- Studied in
- Quercus, Fagaceae
- Sample size
- review of the mast-seeding literature
Weather cues, particularly spring temperature, predict masting well but do not by themselves explain the depletion of resources that follows a large crop, and neither resource dynamics nor weather alone reproduces the observed synchrony across populations. Of the ultimate explanations, predator satiation and pollination efficiency both have supporting evidence, and their relative importance differs by species and site.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Masting arises from an interaction between weather cues, internal resource state and selection from seed predators and pollination, and no single-factor account is adequate.
How NatureHQ reads it
This is a topic where the popular explanation — trees "decide" to overwhelm the squirrels — is a real hypothesis dressed as a settled fact and given an intention it does not have. Predator satiation is genuinely supported. So is pollination efficiency, which is a different mechanism entirely: wind-pollinated trees flowering together get more pollen to more stigmas. NatureHQ carries both and says the balance is unresolved, because it is.
- Long-lived trees require decades-long datasets, and only a handful exist.
- Weather correlations are strong and correlational; the causal pathway is inferred.
- Most work is on north-temperate species, especially oaks and beech.
Counting which acorns survive in a mast year and which do not
Oaks produce enormous acorn crops in some years and almost none in others. Does the big year actually get more seed past the animals that eat them?
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Wiley journalsPublished in a Wiley journal.
This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref on 2026-08-11.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-10.