Response to habitat fragmentation may not be generalized among species, in particular for plant communities with a variety of dispersal traits. Calcareous grasslands are one of the most species-rich habitats in Central Europe, but abandonment of traditional management has caused a dramatic decline of calcareous grassland species. In the Southern Franconian Alb in Germany, reintroduction of rota...

At a certain point in their life cycle, annual plants undergo amajor developmental transition and switch from vegetative to reproductive development. This process is rarely reversible, and ensuring that the timing of this transition is optimal for pollination and seed development is a major factor in reproductive success. Physiological and genetic analysis of flowering has shown that multiple e...

The high-yield varieties ‘Banks’ and ‘Cybonnet’, released to seed growers during 2004, contain the Pi-ta R gene used in blast-resistant varieties for over 16 years. While Cybonnet fields were blast free, severe blast disease developed in drought-stressed Banks growing in a sandy production field in Clay County during 2004 and then again in sandy fields throughout Arkansas during 2005 and 2006. ...

BACKGROUND The Central Amazonian floodplain forests are subjected to extended periods of flooding and to flooding amplitudes of 10 m or more. The predictability, the length of the flood pulse, the abrupt transition in the environmental conditions along topographic gradients on the banks of major rivers in Central Amazonia, and the powerful water and sediment dynamics impose a strong selective p...

Pneumoviruses are responsible for significant respiratory disease in their hosts and represent a major problemfor human and animal health. Pneumoviruses are members of the family Paramyxoviridae, subfamilyPneumovirinae and the virus particles consist of a negative-sense, nonsegmented RNA genome within a helical nucleocapsid structure enveloped in a lipid membrane derived from the ho...

electron micrographs of many plant features and details of their reproduction. “Our work results from an enthusiasm to communicate and express our shared passion and fascination for the beauty of sexual reproduction among flowering plants,” the authors write. Their aim is to engage audiences for the research and conservation work in the plant sciences carried out throughout the world. And they ...

Meadowfoam (Limnanthes alba Benth., Limnanthaceae) produces a very-long chain seed oil with novel physical and chemical characteristics (Earle et al. 1959; Smith et al. 1960; Bagby et al. 1961; Miller et al. 1964; Isbell 1997). These characteristics have propelled the development of meadowfoam as a specialty oilseed crop and the development of industrial markets for meadowfoam oil and oil deriv...

In grasses, variation in seed size and dormancy often results from a seed's position within a dispersal unit. In this paper, I asked whether seed positional effect within a spikelet contributes to ecotypic differentiation between two populations of Avena sterilis having different species range position and associated aridity. I created experimental seed banks in which germination of seeds (flor...

For nearly 30 years, ecologists have argued that predators of seeds and seedlings seldom have population-level effects on plants with persistent seed banks and density-dependent seedling survival. We parameterized stage-based population models that incorporated density dependence and seed dormancy with data from a 5.5-year experiment that quantified how granivorous mice and herbivorous voles in...

Increasing attention in invasion biology is being paid to measuring and understanding the impacts of invasive species. For plant invasions, however, the impact of invasion on soil seed bank communities has been under-studied. At six sites in southern Germany, we investigated whether areas invaded by Solidago gigantea and Solidago canadensis experienced a reduction in seed bank species richness,...