In addition to crop management, understanding vernalization could be used to identify plant communities at risk from climate change.

In plants that produce both closed, obligatory self-pollinated (cleistogamous) and open, potentially out-crossed (chasmogamous) flowers, suboptimal conditions typically favour production of cleistogamous flowers. Munguía-Rosas et al. study the effects of shade and drought on Ruellia nudiflora and find that cleistogamous flowers are produced earlier under shaded conditions whilst chasmogamous flowers are produced for shorter periods; however, [...]

Genome size is known to affect various plant traits such as stomatal size and seed mass but these associations are not well understood for species with very large genomes, which are largely represented by geophytic plants. Veselý et al.  survey genome size across 219 geophytes and find that it is associated with species’ ecology and phenology, [...]

Mertensia fusiformis (Boraginaceae) is a spring-flowering perennial showing pronounced intraspecific variation in style length and stigma–anther separation. Forrest et al. show that population-level variation in flowering time, driven by patchiness in timing of snowmelt, causes different populations to experience different temperature regimes during flowering and functionally distinct suites of pollinators. The interaction between plant and [...]