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Seed dispersal moves seeds away from the plant that produced them. Wind, water, animals and mechanical release can transport seeds; their relative importance depends on seed structure and the environment. Transport is only one step in recruitment: arrival at a site does not guarantee germination or survival.

A winged seed and a seed enclosed in an animal-consumed fruit illustrate contrasting seed dispersal syndromes. A useful experiment compares where marked seeds arrive with where seedlings actually establish, separating movement from later environmental filtering.

A seed dispersal syndrome is a combination of seed or fruit traits associated with a mode of seed dispersal. Wings can favor transport by wind, while fleshy fruits can attract animals that later deposit the enclosed seeds. The traits generate a hypothesis about likely transport, not direct proof of the agent responsible for every dispersal event.

A comparative study connecting fruit traits with observed disperser networks found that morphological traits better supported broad groups of dispersing birds, terrestrial mammals and bats than chemical or display traits did.^[ref] Direct observations remain valuable because removal of a fruit, deposition of a viable seed and establishment after germination are different stages of successful seed dispersal.

Tobias Nicolas Rojas led a study testing whether combinations of fleshy-fruit traits predict the animals that disperse their seeds. The researchers measured traits of 134 species and compared these with documented fruit–disperser interactions. Separating morphological, chemical and visual traits allowed the proposed seed dispersal syndrome to be tested as a pattern, rather than assumed from a few familiar examples.^[ref]

For example, a strong relationship between fruit mass and diameter need not imply equally strong relationships with chemical traits. The study connects field observations to a specific question in ecology: how reliably can an interaction partner be inferred from an organism's measured features?