In variable environments, organisms must have strategies to ensure fitness as conditions change. For plants, germination can time emergence with favourable conditions for later growth and reproduction (predictive germination), spread the risk of unfavourable conditions (bet hedging) or both (integrated strategies). Here we explored the adaptive value of within- and among-year germination timing...

In bet hedging, organisms sacrifice short-term success to reduce the long-term variance in success. Delayed germination is the classic example of bet hedging, in which a fraction of seeds remain dormant as a hedge against the risk of complete reproductive failure. Here, we investigate the adaptive nature of delayed germination as a bet hedging strategy using long-term demographic data on Sonora...

Understanding the adaptations that allow species to live in temporally variable environments is essential for predicting how they may respond to future environmental change. Variation at the intergenerational scale can allow the evolution of bet-hedging strategies: a novel genotype may be favoured over an alternative with higher arithmetic mean fitness if the new genotype experiences a sufficie...

this study set out to investigate the similarities and differences in frequency of incidence and type of hedging devices used in research articles written by iranian and non-iranian writers. for the purposes of the study, a corpus including 40 agriculture articles in english (20 written by iranian and 20 by non-iranian writers) were selected. collection and classification of the hedging devices...

To deal with severe drought when water supply is insufficient hedging rule, based on hedging rule curve, is proposed. In general, in discrete hedging rules, the rationing factors have changed from a zone to another zone at once. Accordingly, this paper is an attempt to improve the conventional hedging rule to control the changes of rationing factors. In this regard, the simulation model has emp...

Bet hedging is one solution to the problem of an unpredictably variable environment: fitness in the average environment is sacrificed in favor of lower variation in fitness if this leads to higher long-run stochastic mean fitness. While bet hedging is an important concept in evolutionary ecology, empirical evidence that it occurs is scant. Here we evaluate whether bet hedging occurs via seed ba...

Evolutionary bet hedging encapsulates the counterintuitive idea that organisms evolve traits that reduce short-term reproductive success in favor of longer-term risk reduction. It has been widely investigated theoretically, and many putative examples have been cited including practical ones such as the dormancy involved in microbe and weed persistence. However, long-term data on demographic var...

this study examined the effect of explicit instruction of hedging on english forspecific academic purposes (esap) reading comprehension performance ofenglish language learning (ell) university students. a reading comprehensiontest was developed and validated as the pretest and the posttest. the test, includingitems for assessing the comprehension of the students in their area of specialization,...