“…Reciprocal transplants have predominantly been applied for herbaceous and shrubby species growing in temperate regions (Fenster & Galloway, 2000; Franks, Weber, & Aitken, 2014; Grassein, Lavorel, & Till‐Bottraud, 2014; Malikova, Latzel, Smilauer, & Klimesova, 2016), with few exceptions in the tropics (Chen & Schemske, 2015), because it may take several years to evaluate the overall plant performance during an individual's life span. Although all the phases should be studied in order to obtain the complete picture of ecotypic adaptations, in arboreal species it may be methodologically appropriate, if not plainly inevitable, to split the cycle into practical sets of phases: As Darwin 1994, page 86, put it: “… so in a state of nature, natural selection will be enabled to act on and modify organic beings at any age, by the accumulation of profitable variations at that age, and by their inheritance at a corresponding age.” As significant plant mortality occurs during the seedling establishment and sapling growth phenophases, natural selection should in theory strongly benefit variants within plant populations with higher plant performance in these phases (Postma & Agren, 2016). Hence, plant performance during seedling establishment and sapling initial growth of long‐lived species should logically be a reliable indicator of ecotypic differentiation in the context of range size and habitat distribution.…”