Articles of an international symposium take on the conflict of balancing different eco-physiological requirements of plants in the process sequence of resource allocation. Focus is on the trade-off between growth and stress defence with respective cost/benefit assessments. Growth is the precondition to ensuring competitive resource acquisition, and defence is the precondition to retaining these resources for the plant after incorporation.

Recognizing the plant’s intensive exchange of resources with its abiotic and biotic environment, this integrated approach requires spatial and temporal process scaling. This is tested with regard to both the mechanistic and ecologically relevant clarification potential. The analysis of the process integration of the functional and structural plant and ecosystem-inherent biological organization levels (scales) is identified as the precondition for spatial and temporal pattern disclosure during the allocation sequence. These articles thereby achieve a new quality in a comprehensive, process-based, integrative understanding of “system biology”.