Fruit ecology: the concept, basic scientific issues, research advances and prospects

摘要

The concept of Seed Ecology was provided by Michael Fenner in 1985. He published a book whose name is called seed ecology (Yu ef al 2012). As known to nearly all, seed is just a constitution part of fruit. For some angiosperms, seeds are nearly the same thing as fruits, such as caryopsis and utricle. However, in most cases, seeds are different from fruits. In fruit research there are a series of special scientific questions which are different from that of seed ecology. In previous literatures, lotsof research works have been conducted in the aspect of relationship between fruits and their environment, but detail summarization is still scant in fruit studies.