Early life-cycle events play critical roles in determining the population and community dynamics of plants. The ecology of seeds and their germination patterns can determine range limits, adaptation to environmental variation, species diversity, and community responses to climate change. Understanding the adaptive consequences and environmental filtering of such functional traits will allow us ...

∗ Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mengla, Yunnan 666303, China † Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, North East Normal University, Changchun 130024, China ‡ School of Life Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China § Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China # Department of Ecology and Biodi...

Responses of seed germination to temperature, water potential, time after harvest, and light were investigated for Stenocereus queretaroensis, a columnar cactus native to west central Mexico. Germination was optimal between 201C and 301C, and the germination percentage decreased as the water potential was lowered from 0?00 to 1?0 MPa. Maximal germination of 85% occurred for seeds that were 11 –...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS This study examined the adaptive association between seed germination ecology and specialization to either forest or open habitats across a range of evolutionary lineages of seed plants, in order to test the hypotheses that (1) species' specialization to open vs. shaded habitats is consistently accompanied by specialization in their regeneration niche; and (2) species are th...

Many studies have focused on the ecology of seed dimorphism, the production of two seed types by a single plant. Morphology and seed size are usually correlated, but how morphology affects germination percentage and seedling growth is poorly understood. Here we explicitly separate these effects for nine populations of the dimorphic species Tragopogon pratensis subsp. pratensis. Larger seeds yie...