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 f..., A full description of the methods for data collection are provided in the manuscript associated with this Dryad submission. Briefly, we used field surveys and experiments to observe components of above- and below-ground demography for 20 populations across the range of Clarkia xantiana ssp. xantiana. To collect data on seedling survival, fruit production, and seed set, we used field surveys. In each population, these surveys included observations in both permanent plots as well as additional, haphazardly sampled plots arrayed across the population. To observe emergence of seedlings and seeds remaining intact in the soil seed bank, we conducted field experiments, which were complemented with lab experiments in order to assay viability of seeds. Brief details for each dataset are provided below, and the manuscript associated with these datasets describes the survey and experimental methods in further detail. We also estimated cumulative precipitation from February-June at each of the 20 p..., Data collection is described in the manuscript associated with this dataset.
Code associated with the analysis of the raw data provided in this Dryad submission is submitted on Zenodo and can be found at the following link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7734839
The corresponding authors for this dataset are Monica Geber ([e-mail]), David Moeller ([e-mail]), and Vincent Eckhart ([e-mail]).