Aim Widespread species encounter a range of variable climates that can lead to intraspecific trait clines. Such clines can be the result of phenotypic plasticity, genetic differences, or both. Although latitude often explains a large part of trait variation, it is crucial to investigate the underlying environmental variables to understand current and future trait responses. Cross‐continental comparisons of species that are nat...

Plants along mountain slopes experience strong environmental variation, particularly declining air temperature with increasing elevation. Investigating intraspecific variation in morphological traits and biomass allocation across elevational gradients can reveal how plants adjust their life-history strategies to climatic conditions, improving our understanding of their resilience to climate change. We analysed variation in ove...

Seed harvesting from wild plant populations is key for ecological restoration, but it may threaten the persistence of the source populations. Consequently, several countries have set guidelines limiting the proportions of harvestable seeds. However, these guidelines are inconsistent and lack a solid empirical basis. We used matrix population models based on 280 wild plant species, stored in he COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database, t...

Rapid environmental changes across Europe include warmer and increasingly variable temperatures, changes in soil nutrient availability, and pollinator decline. These abiotic and biotic changes can affect natural plant populations and force them to optimize resource use against competitors. To date, the evolution of competitive ability in the context of changes in nutrient availability remains understudied. In this study, we in...

Ongoing global warming and increasing drought frequencies impact plant populations and potentially drive rapid evolutionary adaptations. Historical comparisons, where plants grown from seeds collected in the past are compared to plants grown from freshly collected seeds from populations of the same sites, are a powerful method to investigate recent evolutionary changes across many taxa. We used 21–38 years old seeds of 13 Euro...

Cliffs are unique ecosystems with an outstanding but relatively unknown plant diversity, harboring rare, endemic and threatened species, but also rock-specialist or generalist species that can become locally common and dominant on cliffs. The rising popularity of climbing represents an increasing threat to cliff biota, affecting community composition and potentially diminishing diversity and species associations. We used a nov...

Because inbreeding is common in natural populations of plants and their herbivores, herbivore‐induced selection on plants, and vice versa , may be significantly modified by inbreeding and inbreeding depression. In a feeding assay with inbred and outbred lines of both the perennial herb, Vincetoxicum hirundinaria , and its specialist herbivore, Abrostola asclepiadis , we discovered that plant inbreeding increased inbreeding dep...

Elytrigia atherica is a tall clonal grass species typical of higher salt marshes, but is gradually invading to the lower marshes. At young successional stages of a salt marsh, E. atherica is found sparsely dispersed in small groups of ramets. These patches increase in size and ramet density over time, eventually forming extensive swards as succession proceeds. This study investigates the change in the clonal diversity of E. at...