Flowering plants are sessile upon germination and may exhibit limited pollen and seed dispersal in space. That is, plant species may undergo two phases of dispersal (at gametic and zygotic stages) in spatially structured populations. In general, studying evolutionary dynamics in spatially structured populations entails considering kin competition (and thus kin selection on traits). However, compared to previous, evolutionary models of animal behaviors, there are few studies that work on the two phases of dispersal in plants, and thus we lack a general framework to study kin selection in plants.
Here, I illustrate an extended framework to study the evolutionary dynamics in hermaphroditic plants that inhabit spatially structured populations, with a concrete example of pollination facilitation among relatives. The framework explicitly considers self-fertilization (in which ovules can be sired by a pollen grain of the same parent), pollen- and seed-dispersal, and I analyze how these factors jointly affect the spatial genetic structure (or Wright’s F-statistics). I demonstrate that the present framework is fully consistent with the previous theory and conclude that kin selection theory in animal behaviors can be extended to plant traits.