Some plants can “escape” drought stress by speeding up their life cycles, minimising water loss and allocating more resources to roots when water is available. Over half of the world’s worst weeds are annuals and occur...
Plant functional traits often vary across space, particularly when species encounter contrasting environmental conditions throughout their range. Such phenotypic variation is determined by both genetic and environmental...
How do plants react when circumstances change? One method can be to evolve a local adaptation. Another can be be phenotypic plasticity, changing the shape of the plant to tackle a local problem. Silvia Matesanz and...
Polyploidy (whole genome duplication) is one of the most important processes in plant evolution. Most land plants have an evolutionary history that includes multiple polyploidization events. Allopolyploidy...
Within a species, plant traits may vary substantially along environmental gradients. However, is such variation (1) consistent across locations and (2) genetic or non-genetic (i.e., plastic) in nature? In a recent...
Recent global changes, particularly warming and drought, have had worldwide repercussions on the timing of flowering events for many plant species. Phenological shifts have also been reported in alpine environments...
Ahern and Whitney use common garden experiments with common cocklebur, Xanthium strumarium (Asteraceae), to examine relationships between stereochemical variation in sesquiterpene lactones, herbivore damage and plant...
Climate may determine changes in seed dormancy in the short and the long term, shaping plant responses to global change. Fernández-Pascual et al. investigate germination in Centaurium somedanum, a narrow endemic...
Early life history stages are among the most critical phases in the life cycle of plants. De Frenne et al. assess the response of plant regeneration from seed of two forest understorey plants (Anemone nemorosa and...