Native plants for greening Mediterranean agroecosystems.

In the upcoming United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, a global challenge for scientists and practitioners will be to develop a well-functioning seed production sector on the basis of a sound species-selection process. To balance crop production with biodiversity functions in Mediterranean woody crops, agroecological practices suggest the need to move towards the establishment of herbaceous ground covers. However, establishing such plants requires a supply of suitable native seeds, which is currently unavailable.

Hydrothermal thresholds for seed germination in winter annual forbs from old-field Mediterranean landscapes.

Under Mediterranean climates with dry-hot summers and cool-wet winters, many forbs with potential for habitat restoration are winter annuals, but there is little information about their germination. We performed laboratory germination experiments on 13 ruderal dicots native to Andalusia (southern Spain). We measured the germination of recently harvested seeds from natural populations across nine temperature treatments (from 5 to 35 °C, constant and alternate); two storage periods; and eight water stress treatments (from 0 to -1.