How do plants make a living? Some plants are gamblers, others are swindlers. Some plants are habitual spenders while others are strugglers and miserly savers. Plants have evolved a spectacular array of solutions to the existential problems of survival and reproduction in a world where resources are scarce, disturbances can be deadly, and competition is cut-throat. Few topics have both captured the imagination and furrowed the brows of plant ecologists, yet no topic is more important for understanding the assembly of plant communities, predicting plant responses to global change, and enhancing the restoration of our rapidly degrading biosphere. The vast array of plant strategy models that characterize the discipline now require synthesis. These models tend to emphasize either life history strategies based on demography, or functional strategies based on ecophysiology. Indeed, this disciplinary divide between demography and physiology runs deep and continues to this today. The goal of this accessible book is to articulate a coherent framework that unifies life history theory with comparative functional ecology to advance prediction in plant ecology. Armed with a deeper understanding of the dimensionality of life history and functional traits, we are now equipped to quantitively link phenotypes to population growth rates across gradients of resource availability and disturbance regimes. Predicting how species respond to global change is perhaps the most important challenge of our time. A robust framework for plant strategy theory will advance this research agenda by testing the generality of traits for predicting population dynamics.

Plant Strategies, Vegetation Processes, and Ecosystem Properties, Second Edition, is a thoroughly updated and comprehensive new edition of the very successful Plant Strategies and Vegetative Processes, which controversially proposed the existence of widely-recurring plant functional types with predictable relationships to vegetation structure and dynamics. This second edition uses evidence from many parts of the world to re-examine these concepts in the light of the enormous expansion in the literature. Features include: * A new section covering all aspects of ecosystem properties * New chapters on Assembling of Communities Rarification and Extinction Colonisation and Invasion * Principles and methodologies of a range of international tests including case study examples * Chapter summaries for a quick reference guide * Index of species names Written in a very readable style, this book is an invaluable reference source for researchers in the areas of plant, animal, and community ecology, conservation and land management. 'Written by one of the foremost authorities in the field, summarising over 35 years of research. A book all plant ecologists will want to read.' - Jonathan Silvertown, Department of Biological Sciences, The Open University, UK. 'The coverage is outstanding and comprehensive.' - Simon A. Levin, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, USA

Although ecologists have long considered morphology and life history to be important determinants of the distribution, abundance, and dynamics of plants in nature, this book contains the first theory to predict explicitly both the evolution of plant traits and the effects of these traits on plant community structure and dynamics. David Tilman focuses on the universal requirement of terrestrial plants for both below-ground and above-ground resources. The physical separation of these resources means that plants face an unavoidable tradeoff. To obtain a higher proportion of one resource, a plant must allocate more of its growth to the structures involved in its acquisition, and thus necessarily obtain a lower proportion of another resource. Professor Tilman presents a simple theory that includes this constraint and tradeoff, and uses the theory to explore the evolution of plant life histories and morphologies along productivity and disturbance gradients. The book shows that relative growth rate, which is predicted to be strongly influenced by a plant's proportional allocation to leaves, is a major determinant of the transient dynamics of competition. These dynamics may explain the differences between successions on poor versus rich soils and suggest that most field experiments performed to date have been of too short a duration to allow unambiguous interpretation of their results.

This collection of reviews by leading investigators examines plant reproduction and sexuality within a framework of evolutionary ecology, providing an up-to-date account of the field. The contributors discuss conceptual issues, showing the importance of sex allocation, sexual selection and inclusive fitness, and the dimensions of paternity and maternity in plants. The evolution, maintenance, and loss of self-incompatibility in plants, the nature of 'sex choice' in plants, and sex dimorphism are all explored in detail. Specific forms of biotic interactions shaping the evolution of plant reproductive strategy are discussed, and a taxonomically based review of the reproductive ecology of non-angiosperm plant groups, such as bryophytes, ferns, and algae, is presented. Together these studies focus on the complexities of plant life cycles and the distinctive reproductive biologies of these organisms, while showing the similarities between nonflowering plants and the more thoroughly documented flowering species.

This book provides an account of the classical and recent trends in plant sciences, which have contributed for disease management strategies in plants for sustainable agriculture. Advancements in the disciplines of biological sciences like biotechnology, microbiology, bioinformatics as well as information and communication technology etc has given the new dimensions for the development of new plant disease management strategies. By keeping this perspective in view, the editors collected and compiled the useful, practical and recent information regarding plant disease management from a diverse group of authors from different countries associated with well-reputed scientific, teaching and research organizations with the objective to update and equip the researchers with comprehensive and latest knowledge of plant disease management. This book is based on the knowledge of traditional and modern approaches for plant disease management. It has 15 chapters, each chapter describing the pillar strategies, which may be the possible way for crop protection from diseases.This effort deals with the history and recent trends in plant disease control, plant genetics and physiology in disease prognosis, conventional plant breeding program for disease resistance, synthetic chemicals: major component of plant disease management, biological antagonism: expected safe and sustainable way to manage plant diseases , soil microbes and plant health, conventional and modern technologies for the management of post-harvest diseases, nanobiotechnology, an innovative plant disease management approach, transgenic approaches in plants: strategic control for disease management, exploiting RNAi mechanism in plants for disease resistance, genome editing technologies for resistance against phytopathogens: principles, applications and future prospects, plant health clinics in Pakistan: operations and prospects, precision agriculture technologies for management of plant disease, quarantine and regulations and development and implementation of IDM program for annual and perennial crops.

Biological diversity, the variety of living organisms on Earth, is traditionally viewed as the diversity of taxa, and species in particular. However, other facets of diversity also need to be considered for a comprehensive understanding of evolutionary and ecological processes. This novel book demonstrates the advantages of adopting a functional approach to diversity in order to improve our understanding of the functioning of ecological systems and their components. The focus is on plants, which are major components of these systems, and for which the functional approach has led to major scientific advances over the last 20 years. Plant Functional Diversity presents the rationale for a trait-based approach to functional diversity in the context of comparative plant ecology and agroecology. It demonstrates how this approach can be used to address a number of highly debated questions in plant ecology pertaining to plant responses to their environment, controls on plant community structure, ecosystem properties, and the services these deliver to human societies. This research level text will be of particular relevance and use to graduate students and professional researchers in plant ecology, agricultural sciences and conservation biology.

Biology of Plant Metabolomics is an exciting new volume in Wiley-Blackwell's highly successful Annual Plant Reviews series. Concentrating on the biology and biological relevance of plant metabolomics, each chapter, written by internationally-acknowledged experts in the field from at least two different research groups, combines a review of the existing biological results with an extended assessment of possible future developments and the impact that these will have on the type of research needed for the future. Following a general introduction, this exciting volume includes details of metabolomics of model species including Arabidopsis and tomato. Further chapters provide in-depth coverage of abiotic stress, data integration, systems biology, genetics, genomics, chemometrics and biostatisitcs. Applications of plant metabolomics in food science, plant ecology and physiology are also comprehensively covered. Biology of Plant Metabolomics provides cutting edge reviews of many major aspects of this new and exciting subject. It is an essential purchase for plant scientists, plant geneticists and physiologists. All libraries in universities and research establishments where biological sciences are studied and taught should have a copy of this Annual Plant Reviews volume on their shelves.