Plant size and clonality are important traits for explaining the reproductive eff ort of clonal plants. Larger plants can invest more resources into reproduction, and clonality is known to increase reproductive eff ort. Moreover, reproductive eff ort is infl uenced by environmental variation, and so the spatial distribution of plants may aff ect plant reproductive eff ort. We investigated the eff ect of plant size, clonality and spatial distribution on the reproductive eff ort of Vriesea carinata in the Atlantic Forest in the state of Paraná, Brazil. We marked twenty individual plants and measured their rosette size, biomass and number, as well as rosette reproductive eff ort (number of fl owers, fruits and seeds). We also evaluated the relationship between reproductive eff ort and spatial distribution of plants. Reproductive eff ort did not correlate with size, whereas greater clonal growth contributed to a lower reproductive eff ort because rosettes within clones that had more rosettes set fewer fl owers. We found that plants growing closer to each other exhibited similar reproductive eff orts independently of vegetative traits, because reproductive traits were spatially autocorrelated. In Vriesea carinata, the main drivers of reproductive eff ort are clonality, which decreases fl ower production, and spatial factors, which result in greater similarity in reproductive eff orts among more proximate plants.