Editorial – Clonal plants and environmental heterogeneity – space, time and scale

Abstract

The fifth Clonal Plant Workshop entitled 'Clonal plants and environmental heterogeneity – space, time and scale' was held at the University of Wales, Bangor, from the 9th to the 14th September 1997. The workshops began in 1988, when a small group of plant scientists with different backgrounds met in the Netherlands to discuss plant clonality. This meeting was followed by workshops in 1990, 1992 and 1995 in Sweden, the Czech Republic and Hungary, respectively. The purpose of the Bangor meeting was to continue to integrate knowledge from a wide range of biological disciplines to attempt a better understanding of clonal plants in the context of the heterogeneous environments in which they occur. This special issue is a collection of a number of the presentations at the Bangor workshop. The effects of spatial and temporal environmental heterogeneity on individuals, populations and communities are, of course, diverse, and this collection of papers is not intended to provide a synthesis of the ecological consequences of environmental heterogeneity. Rather, this special issue more accurately reflects progress in various areas of clonal plant research including population dynamics of ramets and genets, mathematical modelling and molecular techniques. We wish to thank all participants of the workshop for their contribution and trust that they found the meeting as stimulating and enjoyable as we did. We are indebted to the authors and the many referees for their friendly cooperation and to Plant Ecology for publishing the proceedings. We also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the following that made the workshop possible: The British Ecological Society, The Tansley Fund of the New Phytologist Trust, The Countryside Council for Wales, The Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (Bangor) and Skye Instruments Ltd, Wales.