Identifying the environmental drivers of variation in fitness‐related traits is a central objective in ecology and evolutionary biology. Temporal fluctuations of these environmental drivers are often synchronized at large spatial scales. Yet, whether synchronous environmental conditions can generate spatial synchrony in fitness‐related trait values (i.e., correlated temporal trait fluctuations across populations) is poorly und...

Small‐seeded plant species are often reported to have high relative growth rate or RGR. However, because RGR declines as plants grow larger, small‐seeded species could achieve higher RGR simply by virtue of their small size. In contrast, size‐standardized growth rate or SGR factors out these size effects. Differences in SGR can thus only be due to differences in morphology, allocation, or physiology. We used nonlinear regressi...