Folia Geobotanica | 2019
Seed germination niche across habitats: an introduction to this special issue
Abstract
The regeneration niche is driven by complex mechanisms determining the environmental requirements that influence the establishment of plants. The importance of the regeneration niche in the ecology of plant populations and communities was first highlighted by Grubb (1977). In the 42 years that have passed since that publication, plant ecology has been developed in many areas related to the regeneration niche, such as the study of forest gaps, disturbance, seed dispersal, germination or plant recruitment. In seed plants, a key step in the regeneration process is the germination of seeds, which is mainly determined by ecological and evolutionary factors (Baskin and Baskin 2014). The seed regeneration niche is therefore a key topic for understanding the main drivers influencing species’ distributions in natural and semi-natural habitats. Although we have accumulated a large amount of information about the germination ecology of species, the use of seed traits has been neglected at the expense of other plant traits (Jiménez-Alfaro et al. 2016). One of the current challenges of the research agenda for seedtrait functional ecology is the understanding of the multiple factors that influence seed responses to the environment, or the seed ecological spectrum (Saatkamp et al. 2019). Predicting the ability of plant populations to regenerate in the field is, however, hindered by the lack of germination experiments focused on the environmental drivers that influence seed regeneration in specific habitats. Because the seed germination niche is ultimately determined by micro-site conditions, designing germination studies in the laboratory requires pre-existing knowledge about the main drivers operating in each habitat. In this special issue of Folia Geobotanica, we present a series of papers about seed responses to environmental drivers across different vegetation types in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia (Table 1). The thirteen papers collated here are good examples of the many questions that plant ecologists may ask to improve their understanding of the seed germination niche. This topic is not new in Folia Geobotanica, which has published a total of 294 papers on seed germination Folia Geobot https://doi.org/10.1007/s12224-019-09351-6