Seed banks are critically important for disturbance specialist plants because seeds of these species germinate only in disturbed soil. Disturbance and seed depth affect the survival and germination probability of seeds in the seed bank, which in turn affect population dynamics. We develop a density-dependent stochastic integral projection model to evaluate the effect of stochastic soil disturba...

Most research on the genetics of invasive plant species has focused on analyzing spatial differences among existing populations. Using a long-established Gunnera tinctoria population from Ireland, we evaluated the potential of using plants derived from seeds associated with different soil layers to track genetic variation through time. This species and site were chosen because (1) G. tinctoria ...

Persistent seed banks may provide information on historical changes in the genetic composition of populations. We used stratified sampling of the soil seed bank of Astragalus bibullatus (Pyne’s ground plum) to assess levels of temporal variation in population genetic structure and to infer historical changes in the levels of inbreeding and relative gene flow. This species has an extremely limit...

Seed longevity, a fundamental plant trait for ex situ conservation and persistence in the soil of many species, varies across populations and generations that experience different climates. Mondoni et al. (pp. 1257–1263) study seeds from alpine and lowland populations of Silene vulgaris and show that seed longevity has a genetic basis but may show strong adaptive responses, which are associated...

Persistent seed banks may provide information on historical changes in the genetic composition of populations. We used stratified sampling of the soil seed bank of Astragalus bibullatus (Pyne's ground plum) to assess levels of temporal variation in population genetic structure and to infer historical changes in the levels of inbreeding and relative gene flow. This species has an extremely limit...

BACKGROUND Problem weeds in agriculture, such as Lolium rigidum Gaud., owe some of their success to their large and dormant seed banks, which permit germination throughout a crop-growing season. Dormant weed seed banks could be greatly depleted by application of a chemical that stimulates early-season germination and then kills the young seedlings. Fluridone, a phytoene desaturase-inhibiting he...

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,...

We attempted to confirm that seed banks can be viewed as an important genetic reservoir by testing the hypothesis that standing (aboveground) plants represent a nonrandom sample of the seed bank. We sampled multilocus allozyme genotypes from three species with different life history strategies: Amaranthus retroflexus, Carduus acanthoides, Pastinaca sativa. In four populations of each species we...