The Editor’s Choice article forVolume 107 Issue 6is a study by Quintana‐Ascencioet al., which looks at therole of seed dormancy, dispersal and fire history on plant population dynamics, distribution and abundance. Associate Editor, Shurong Zhou, discusses this new research paper in more detail.
Biodiversity conservation and management depend on our understanding of population dynamics at multiple scales. However, most population models consider only small spatial scales. The predicted patterns of distribution and abundance may not scale up to a larger, regional scales – where environmental or anthropogenic changes are usually involved (Beissinger & Westphal 1998). So, predicting regional population distribution and viability may be critically important when dealing with large scale changes in population dynamics, for conversation and management. However, possibly due to difficulties in collecting long-term and large-scale demographic data, many studies chose to ignore the underlying landscape issue or treat it in a simplistic manner.
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Most living organisms need to mobilise their propagules to avoid inter-specific competition, escape suboptimal or poor local conditions and colonise suitably remote sites. Dispersal is particularly challenging for sessile organisms, such as plants that typically get dispersed across the landscape by disseminating their seeds. Dispersal has long fascinated ecologists and distinguished naturalists, such as Darwin and Wallace, who have invoked dispersal and migration processes to explain biogeographic patterns.