Resource Strategies of Wild Plants

Joseph M. Craine

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780691139128
  9780691139111
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400830640
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Ecologia

Over millions of years, terrestrial plants have competed for limited resources, defended themselves against herbivores, and resisted a myriad of environmental stresses. These struggles have helped generate more than a quarter million terrestrial plant species, each possessing a unique strategy for success. Yet, as Resource Strategies of Wild Plants demonstrates, the constraints on plant growth are universal enough that a few survival strategies hold true for all seed-producing plants. This book describes the five major strategies of growth for terrestrial plants, details how plants succeed when resources are scarce, delves into the history of research into plant strategies, and resets the foundational understanding of ecological processes.


Drawing from recent findings in plant-herbivore interactions, ecosystem ecology, and evolutionary ecology, Joseph Craine explains how plants attain available nutrients, withstand the immense stresses of drying soils, and flourish in the race for light. He shows that the competition for resources has shaped plant evolution in newly discovered ways, while the scarcity of such resources has affected how plants interact with herbivores, wind, fire, and frost. An understanding of the major resource strategies of wild plants remains central to learning about the ecology of plant communities, global changes in the biosphere, methods for species conservation, and the evolution of life on earth.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 The Basis for Plant Strategies
• Chapter 2 The History of Plant Strategies
• Chapter 3 Stress and Disturbance
• Chapter 4 Resource Limitation
• Chapter 5 Competition for Nutrients and Light
• Chapter 6 Comparing Negative Effects
• Chapter 7 The Low-Nutrient Strategy
• Chapter 8 The High-Resource Strategy
• Chapter 9 The Low-Light Strategy
• Chapter 10 The Low-Water and Low-CO2 Strategies
• Chapter 11 A Synthesis of Plant Strategies
• Bibliography
• Index