Post provided by Apolline Louvet

Seed banks play a key role in plant metapopulations, however, detecting seed banks remains challenging. The current method of assessing the effect of seed banks on plant metapopulation dynamics focuses on the presence of standing vegetation. This has direct implications for plant metapopulation models, which require data on the absence of a seed bank to understand plant dynamics.

Our paper, ‘Detecting seed bank influence on plant metapopulation dynamics’ in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, introduces a new metric on plant metapopulations, which assesses the seed bank contribution to the global observed dynamics. In this post, we recall what led us to develop this metric.

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