One way to preserve plants suffering from rising temperatures is to relocate them in new areas that have become suitable for them. But when a plant grows in the sands of a harsh desert, you don't want that habitat to...
Plants that have grown in partnership with human activity in meadows can be a great source of seeds for restoration projects, but their ability to germinate is also a problem.
Seed germination is a critical step in the life cycle of flowering plants. Since seeds contain limited reserves, seed germination has to be tightly regulated to ensure that germination takes place in a suitable...
Herkogamy, the spatial separation of sex organs in hermaphroditic plants, is thought to have evolved to reduce self-pollination and inbreeding within a population. Yet there has been little evidence to support these...
Bidens pilosa L. (also known as cobbler’s pegs, farmer’s friend and burr marigold) is a noxious weed in many ecosystems worldwide. Across China, the plant can be found growing on roadsides and in fields and villages at...
Hunting in otherwise intact tropical forests removes organisms from some trophic levels, which can change population and community dynamics at other levels. The preferred game species can be dispersers of seeds (e.g...
Substantial evidence supports morpho-physiological dormancy (MPD) as the basal kind of seed dormancy in flowering plants. However, for seeds of waterlilies (Nymphaea, Nymphaeaceae), only physiological dormancy (PD) is...
Pyroloids, forest sub-shrubs of the Ericaceae family, are an important model for their mixotrophic nutrition, which mixes carbon from photosynthesis and from their mycorrhizal fungi. They have medical uses but are...
The results show the relative importance of the different factors that may be involved in explaining the occurrence of photoinhibition in Lilioid monocots.
It's difficult to peer into the past to see the first flowering plant, but Charlie Scutt shows how an ancestor in the modern-era provides some clues as to what it looked like.
Dormancy mechanisms act to optimise the timing of seed germination for many seed plants. Fogliani et al. demonstrate that the New-Caledonian shrub Amborella trichopoda exhibits a type of morphophysiological dormancy in...