Ecologists have worked to ascribe function to the variation found in plant populations,
communities and ecosystems across environments for at least the past century. The vast …

Trait‐based approaches have improved our understanding of plant evolution, community
assembly and ecosystem functioning. A major challenge for the upcoming decades is to …

In this chapter, we will describe the intricate links between seedling ecology and life history
traits such as seed mass, time to maturity, adult size, and reproductive life span. We will pay …

A goal in trait‐based ecology is to understand and predict plant community responses to
environmental change; however, diversity stored within seed banks that may expand or limit …

Analyses of functional traits have become fundamental tools for understanding patterns and
processes in plant community ecology. In this context, regenerative seed traits play an …

A fundamental challenge in the field of ecology involves understanding the adaptive traits
and life history stages regulating the population dynamics of species across diverse …

Characterizing variation in plant functional traits is often key to understanding community‐
level processes and predicting ecosystem responses to environmental change. Trait‐based …

Seedling recruitment is a critical driver of population dynamics and community assembly, yet
we know little about functional traits that define different recruitment strategies. For the first …

Despite the voluminous literature documenting plant-animal interactions, it is only recently
that ecologists have begun to focus upon the importance of seedling herbivory in plant …

This chapter aims to demonstrate how species-specific traits of seeds and seedlings are
related to life history traits and regeneration strategies of species. The importance of seed …