README.md

Delayed seed germination as a strategy to cope with environmental stress and disturbance

This repository stores all the information related to the manuscript Delayed seed germination as a strategy to cope with environmental stress and disturbance, including the datasets, the scripts to perform data cleaning and analysis, and the Rmarkdown files to create the manuscript.

Abstract

1. Questions: Seeds of many plant species are programmed not to germinate under various environmental scenarios. Thus, delayed seed germination is widespread, despite the higher fitness expected for earlier germinating seeds. We explore delayed germination by testing the hypothesis that it is a mechanism to cope with stress and disturbance during regeneration.
2. Location: Europe.
3. Methods: We retrieved 14,357 records representing 997 species from SeedArc, a global seed germination database. We classified species into four stress groups (low, drought, cold, wetlands) and two disturbance groups (low, high) using their ecological preferences for temperature, moisture and disturbance. We tested the likelihood of delayed germination as a function of stress-disturbance using phylogenetically informed meta-analysis.
4. Results: Delayed germination is more likely in species adapted to cold stress and wetlands, and less likely in species adapted to disturbance. Species adapted to low stress and low disturbance present some degree of delayed germination. Different stress-disturbance groups respond differently to germination cues.
5. Conclusions: Delayed germination is widespread in temperate flowering plants and works as a mechanism to cope with stress, disturbance and competition. The regeneration niche of the angiosperms shows a fundamental divide between those adapted to cold and those adapted to drought.

Keywords

Plant reproduction, plant regeneration, regeneration niche, seed dormancy, seed germination, delayed development, cold stress, drought stress

Contents

This repository is organised following the advice of Wilson et al. 2017 for recording and storing research projects.

The following materials are available in the folders of this repository:

• data Data files including the germination dataset, the ecological indicators and the phylogenetic tree.
• src Scripts in R language to perform the analyses and produce the figures of the manuscript.
• results Output of the R scripts, including figures, tables, model outputs, and appendices.
• doc Files to create the manuscript using Rmarkdown.

Citation

Please cite the repository, datasets and article as:

Eduardo Fernández-Pascual; Angelino Carta; Sergey Rosbakh; Borja Jiménez-Alfaro; Diana María Cruz-Tejada; Markus Wagner; Lorenzo Pinzani; Katalin Lukács; Shyam S. Phartyal. (2026) Delayed seed germination as a strategy to cope with environmental stress and disturbance. Journal of Vegetation Science 37, e70140. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.70140