Using Physiological Models to Identify the Relative Importance of Plant Adaptations to Environmental Variation, an Appreciation of Heckathorn and DeLucia (1991)

When seeking an influential paper from a journal's archive, it's not uncommon to gravitate toward a contribution that is thought to impact an entire discipline, perhaps because it finds support for a novel hypothesis that changes how we think about a particular scientific problem, or perhaps simply because it is formative enough to be cited by everyone working on a particular topic.In thinking about the influential papers that have been published by IJPS during its 150-year history, there are many examples of papers that fall into both categories -and several of these have been commemorated in IJPS during the past year (e.g., Mason 2025; Weber and Goodwillie 2025).But there are also papers that could be highlighted for other reasons -reasons that are more relevant to the development of an individual career, rather than for the field at large.In this reflection, I've chosen to highlight one such paper because it happened to be an important influence on me at the beginning of my graduate career, when I was still learning how to be a scientist.