Larry Venable and students in his lab study plant population and community dynamics and plant reproductive ecology. We currently focus on the population dynamics of desert winter annual plants. This demographic work, with special emphasis on seed banks, is aimed at answering questions about bet hedging and species coexistence mechanisms. Another component of this work examines physiological traits to understand the mechanisms underlying population dynamic variation. Our lab has also conducted field studies of competitive interactions and carbon 14 studies of seed bank age structure with this system (See Desert Laboratory website for more on our desert annual research).

His theoretical work on plant reproductive ecology deals with aspects of dormancy, dispersal, sex allocation, pollen evolution, seed size, hierarchical packaging of reproduction, and the evolution of inflorescence design. He is investigating the evolution of leaves and sexual systems in a speciose Mexican tree genus, and gender evolution in a Sonoran Desert shrub. He also works on seed morphometrics and adaptive geographic differentiation in a seed heteromorphic Mexican annual plant.