Using seed functional traits to understand and predict alpine plant responses to global climate change

To improve predictions of how plants may persist or disappear from ecosystems, we urgently need improved understanding of how climate change affects a critical and vulnerable plant life-history stage and transition–seeds and seed recruitment. Seed ecology is a growing discipline, yet it lacks some of the recent standardised methods and centralised resources of other plant sciences, such as the core databases and methodological handbooks that have spurred plant functional trait innovation since the early 2000s. Alpine areas can provide a glimpse of our future under climate change because they are warming faster than global averages and because alpine ecosystems are temperature-limited and hence more vulnerable to warming. Long-term warming experiments demonstrate that this vulnerability can alter vegetation structure, which in turn may change vegetation function, particularly carbon cycling. To predict which plants will persist, we need better data and frameworks for understanding how seeds and seed recruitment in the alpine respond to warmer climates. I will (1) publish a standardised handbook of core seed trait measurements, (2) collect new trait data from seed collections and harmonise existing datasets to form a publicly accessible alpine seed trait database, (3) establish a functional trait-based framework of seed ecology, and (4) experimentally test how seeds respond to warming as a demonstration of how these new resources can rapidly expand our understanding of climate change effects on seed ecology.