Aims We present an improved model for the growth of individuals in plant populations experiencing competition. Methods Individuals grow sigmoidally according to the Birch model, which is similar to the more commonly used Richards model, but has the advantage that initial plant growth is always exponential. The individual plant growth models are coupled so that there is a maximum total biomass f...

Competition is generally regarded as an important force in organizing the structure of vegetation, and evidence from several experimental studies of species mixtures suggests that larger mature plant size elicits a competitive advantage. However, these findings are at odds with the fact that large and small plant species generally coexist, and relatively smaller species are more common in virtu...

The effect-response framework states that plant functional traits link the abiotic environment to ecosystem functioning. One ecosystem property is the body size of the animals living in the system, which is assumed to depend on temperature or resource availability, among others. For primary consumers, resource availability may directly be related to plant traits, while for secondary consumers t...

Currently, the habitat of many species is fragmented, resulting in small local populations with individuals occasionally dispersing between the remaining habitat patches. In a solitary bee metapopulation, extinction probability was related to both local bee population sizes and pollen resources measured as host plant population size. Patch size, on the other hand, had no additional predictive p...

Two plant genome size databases have been recently updated and/or extended: the Plant DNA C-values database (http://data.kew.org/cvalues), and GSAD, the Genome Size in Asteraceae database (http://www.asteraceaegenomesize.com). While the first provides information on nuclear DNA contents across land plants and some algal groups, the second is focused on one of the largest and most economically i...

Resource competition theory in plants has focused largely on resource acquisition traits that are independent of size, such as traits of individual leaves or roots or proportional allocation to different functions. However, plants also differ in maximum potential size, which could outweigh differences in module-level traits. We used a community ecosystem model called mondrian to investigate whe...

Plant cells in suspension cultures tend to form aggregates. This can affect the physiology of the cells and hence the production of valuable secondary metabolites. Aggregation is also important from a process engineering point of view. In this work, the change in the size distribution of plant cell aggregates in a batch culture is studied. The growth of suspension cultures of Capsicum frutescen...

Identifying the linkages between nutrient properties and plant size is important for reducing uncertainty in understanding the mechanisms of plant phenotypic plasticity. Although the positive effects of grazing exclusion on plant morphological plasticity has been well documented, surprisingly little is known about the relationship of nutrient strategies with plant shoot size after long-term gra...