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Global Change, Clonal Growth, and Biological Invasions by Plants
There are few more active frontiers in plant science than helping understand and predict the ecological consequences of on-going, global changes in climate, land use and cover, nutrient cycling, and acidity. This collection of research papers and reviews focuses on how these changes are likely to interact with two important factors, clonal growth in plants and the introduction of species into new regions by humans, to reshape the ecology of our world. Clonal growth is vegetative reproduction in which offspring remain attached to the parent at least until establishment. Clonal growth is associated with the invasiveness of introduced species, their tendency to spread after introduction and negatively affect other species. Will changes in climate, land cover, or nutrients further increase biological invasions by introduced, clonal plants? The articles in this book seek to address this question with new research and theory on clonal growth and its interactions with invasiveness and other components of global change.
Plant Responses to Environmental Stresses Based on Physiological and Functional Ecology
Plants require a proper balance of matter and energy to maintain their survival and reproduction. Biotic and/or abiotic stresses in diverse environments could influence plant photosynthesis, water and nutrient acquisition and utilization. Through the lens of plant physiological and functional ecology, the study of responses of individual plant traits and/or integration of plant responses to environmental change has been well developed. The variation of plant physiological characteristics and functional traits has been recognized with hundreds of high-quality papers on topics of plant responses to environmental stresses. For now, despite the increasing number of studies trying to establish a linkage between plant physiological processes and functional traits, these covariations have received limited theoretical and experimental verification. This knowledge gap hampers our ability to understand and predict the comprehensive responses of plants to environmental stresses at different scales.
Clonality in the Anthropocene: Adaptation, Evolution, and Functioning of Clonal Plants from Individuals to Ecosystems
The Anthropocene, with the ongoing global changes in climate, land use, acidity, and content of toxins, represents the greatest recent challenges for plants. Clonal plants mainly reproduce vegetatively/asexually, and offspring remain attached to the parent at least until establishment. Despite limited gene recombination and genetic diversity, clonal plants are widely distributed and play significant roles in various ecosystems worldwide. Clonal traits, such as resource sharing and signaling between connected ramets, selective positioning of ramets, reallocation of stored energy/nutrients between connected ramets, initiation of meristem banks in response to clonal integration, and trade-offs ...
Plant Competition in a Changing World
Competitiveness describes a key ability important for plants to grow and survive abiotic and biotic stresses. Under optimal, but particularly under non-optimal conditions, plants compete for resources including nutrients, light, water, space, pollinators and other. Competition occurs above- and belowground. In resource-poor habitats, competition is generally considered to be more pronounced than in resource-rich habitats. Although competition occurs between different players within an ecosystem such as between plants and soil microorganisms, our topic focusses on plant-plant interactions and includes inter-specific competition between different species of similar and different life forms and...
Ecoepigenetics in Clonal and Inbreeding Plants: Transgenerational Adaptation and Environmental Variation
Clonality is widespread in plant species, and clonal plants often have a broad geographic range and long lifespan. Clonality can maintain high fitness in the short term, but vegetative reproduction is commonly considered to preclude adaptation to changing conditions. However, an increasing body of empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that epigenetic modifications such as DNA methylation can provide an alternative to gene-driven evolution through natural selection and allow clonal plants to maintain fitness in the long term. To deepen our understanding of clonal ecology, this collection of research papers and reviews focuses on how epigenetic regulation can encode phenotypic plasticity and contribute to the rapid adaptation of clonal plants to accelerating global and regional environmental changes.
Diversity and Eco-Physiological Responses of Aquatic Plants
Aquatic plants refer to a diverse group of aquatic photosynthetic organisms large enough to be seem with the naked eye, and the vegetative parts of which actively grow either permanently or periodically (for at least several weeks each year) submerged below, floating on, or growing up through the water surface. These include aquatic vascular plants, aquatic mosses and some larger algae. Aquatic plants are grouped into life forms, each of which relates differently to limiting factors and has distinct ecological functions in aquatic ecosystems. Life form groups include emergent macrophytes (plants that are rooted in sediment or soils that are periodically inundated, with all other structures e...
Evolution and the Machinery of Chance
An innovative view of the role of fitness concepts in evolutionary theory. Natural selection is one of the factors responsible for changes in biological populations. Some traits or organisms are fitter than others, and natural selection occurs when there are changes in the distribution of traits in populations because of fitness differences. Many philosophers of biology insist that a trait’s fitness should be defined as an average of the fitnesses of individual members of the population that have the trait. Marshall Abrams argues convincingly against this widespread approach. As he shows, it conflicts with the roles that fitness is supposed to play in evolutionary theory and with the ways ...
