Data from: Bet hedging is not sufficient to explain germination patterns of a winter annual plant

Bet hedging consists of life history strategies that buffer against
environmental variability by trading off immediate and long-term fitness.
Delayed germination in annual plants is a classic example of bet hedging
and is often invoked to explain low germination fractions. We examined
whether bet hedging explains low and variable germination fractions among
20 populations of the winter annual plant Clarkia
xantiana ssp. xantiana that experience substantial
variation in reproductive success among years. Leveraging 15 years of
demographic monitoring and 3 years of field germination experiments, we
assessed the fitness consequences of seed banks and compared optimal
germination fractions from a density-independent bet-hedging model to
observed germination fractions. We did not find consistent evidence of bet
hedging or the expected trade-off between arithmetic and geometric mean
fitness, though delayed germination increased long-term fitness in 7 of 20
populations. Optimal germination fractions were 2 to 5 times higher than
observed germination fractions, and among-population variation in
germination fractions was not correlated with risks across the life cycle.
Our comprehensive test suggests that bet hedging is insufficient to
explain the observed germination patterns. Understanding variation in
germination strategies will likely require integrating bet hedging with
complementary forces shaping the evolution of delayed germination.