Ecological function does not arise from organisms alone, but from their structured relations with one another and with their environment.
This section explores how environmental conditions, ecological interactions and disturbance processes shape living systems across space and time. It brings together ecology, environmental biology, plant science and relational approaches to examine how organisms respond to changing conditions, how ecosystems maintain or lose resilience and how biological organisation emerges through continuous interaction with the environment.
The publications in this area investigate ecological structures and adaptive processes across scales — from seeds, plants and plant–microbe associations to populations, communities and changing landscapes. In medicinal plants, particular attention is given to how habitat, cultivation, seasonality, water availability and biotic interactions influence phytochemical expression and the functional characteristics of plant material.
Their aim is to clarify how environmental conditions shape not only regeneration and ecological persistence, but also the biological identity of plants that may later become medicinal preparations.
At its core, this section asks how living systems become organised through the environments they inhabit — and how that organisation changes when environmental conditions are altered.
Scope
This section examines the environment not as a passive background, but as an active organisational force.
It brings together publications on plant ecology, environmental filtering, seed dormancy and germination, regeneration, ecological adaptation, plant–soil interactions and ecosystem responses to disturbance. The central concern is how organisms and ecological systems maintain function under variable conditions, and how environmental pressures reorganise biological relationships across scales.
The focus extends across several fields: ecology, environmental biology, medicinal plant ecology, plant physiology, restoration ecology, agroecology, evolutionary biology and conservation science. Common to all of them is an interest in the reciprocal relationship between organisms and their environments.
Topics include environmental filtering, fire and hydrological disturbance, drought, water availability, seasonal variation, plant regeneration, seedling establishment, phenotypic plasticity, plant–microbe interactions, phytochemical responses to environmental conditions, cultivation-dependent variability, ecological resilience and ecosystem transitions.
Guiding Questions
How do environmental conditions organise biological function across scales?
When does disturbance promote regeneration, and when does it push an ecological system beyond recovery?
How do fire, water, soil and climate interact to shape dormancy, recruitment and survival?
Can plants of the same species develop different functional states under different ecological conditions?
How do habitat, cultivation and seasonality shape the phytochemical and functional identity of medicinal plants?
What is overlooked when the environment is treated merely as background rather than as part of biological organisation?
Selected Publications
The following publications explore these questions through selected studies, essays and conceptual frameworks. They focus on ecological interaction and environmental organisation as functional dimensions that shape adaptation, regeneration, phytochemical expression and resilience across changing biological systems.