  Across the tree of life, populations have evolved the capacity to contend
with suboptimal conditions by engaging in dormancy, whereby individuals enter a
reversible state of reduced metabolic activity. The resulting seed banks are
complex, storing information and imparting memory that gives rise to
multi-scale structures and networks spanning collections of cells to entire
ecosystems. We outline the fundamental attributes and emergent phenomena
associated with dormancy and seed banks, with the vision for a unifying and
mathematically based framework that can address problems in the life sciences,
ranging from global change to cancer biology.
