Theoretical and Empirical Studies of Plant Life History Variation PDF Download
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Author: Shea Nicole Gardner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 596
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Book Description
Author: Shea Nicole Gardner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 596
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Joseph M. Craine
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400830648
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Over millions of years, terrestrial plants have competed for limited resources, defended themselves against herbivores, and resisted a myriad of environmental stresses. These struggles have helped generate more than a quarter million terrestrial plant species, each possessing a unique strategy for success. Yet, as Resource Strategies of Wild Plants demonstrates, the constraints on plant growth are universal enough that a few survival strategies hold true for all seed-producing plants. This book describes the five major strategies of growth for terrestrial plants, details how plants succeed when resources are scarce, delves into the history of research into plant strategies, and resets the foundational understanding of ecological processes. Drawing from recent findings in plant-herbivore interactions, ecosystem ecology, and evolutionary ecology, Joseph Craine explains how plants attain available nutrients, withstand the immense stresses of drying soils, and flourish in the race for light. He shows that the competition for resources has shaped plant evolution in newly discovered ways, while the scarcity of such resources has affected how plants interact with herbivores, wind, fire, and frost. An understanding of the major resource strategies of wild plants remains central to learning about the ecology of plant communities, global changes in the biosphere, methods for species conservation, and the evolution of life on earth.
Author: Gregor-Fausto Siegmund
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The study of life histories focuses on how evolution molds the life cycles of organisms and on the consequences of those life cycles for the demography and ecology of organisms. Plants exhibit a fantastic array of life history strategies for coping with environmental variability, including delayed germination that creates long-lived soil seed banks and years of vegetative growth followed by a single bout of flowering. In my dissertation, I revisit classic questions about the evolution and ecology of life histories in annual plants under temporal variability. Why do seed banks evolve? How does variability affect population dynamics? Does plant development alter life history strategies? I approach these questions with a variety of methods, from analyzing empirical data to simulations and theory. In Chapter 1, I develop statistical models to estimate seed mortality and germination from field experiments that ecologists regularly use to study the soil seed bank. In the next two chapters, I apply these models to empirical data to ask questions about the evolution of delayed germination and the consequences of temporal variability in demography. In Chapter 2, I test whether bet hedging explains patterns of germination in populations of the winter annual plant Clarkia xantiana ssp. xantiana. Delayed germination is predicted to act as a bet hedging trait via a trade-off between arithmetic and geometric mean fitness. Using 15 years of observations for per-capita reproductive success and estimates of seed survival and germination from a field experiment, I find that some, but not all, populations exhibit the expected trade-off. Across populations, observed germination rates are also lower than expected based on a density-independent bet hedging model. I do not find empirical support for the predictions of bet hedging theory, which suggests that understanding the evolution of delayed germination in C. xantiana ssp. xantiana will likely involve addressing factors such as density-dependence and plasticity in germination. In Chapter 3, I ask how temporal variability in demography shapes stochastic population dynamics across the range of C. xantiana ssp. xantiana. The `abundant center' hypothesis for geographic range limits predicts that vital rates and population growth rates will vary more through time in populations at the range edge than at the range center. I analyze observations from field surveys and experiments, and show that the variability of vital rates shows individualistic, vital-rate specific geographic patterns, but that variability in population growth rate is greatest at the range edge. I also conduct perturbation analyses that suggest variability has a bigger effect on population growth rate at range edges. In this chapter, I describe geographic patterns of variability and elucidate the processes that generate those patterns-closing this loop is central to understanding how life history mediates the effect of temporal variability on populations. In Chapter 4, I study the influence of plant development on the evolution of flowering time in variable environments. In plants, flowering is a critical event in the life cycle in which resources are re-allocated from growth to reproduction and meristems switch from vegetative to floral fates. I develop life history models that explicitly represent resource and meristem dynamics, and analyze the models with methods from optimal control theory. I show that both resources and meristems shape optimal flowering strategies when plants experience variability in season length. My dissertation contributes to the study of plant life histories and expands our empirical and theoretical understanding of the role of seed banks and plant development.
Author: Jonathan Silvertown
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521574952
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
This book reexamines patterns of relationship among plant life history traits in phylogenetic perspective. The reexamination first recognizes that because evolution is a branching process, traits are not randomly distributed across taxa and that therefore analysis of trait correlations cannot treat species as independent data points. It then discusses the use of phylogeny to reconstruct the evolutionary pathways of traits. Part 1 looks at the use of the phylogenetic perspective on trait correlation. Parts 2-4 examine traits from the reproductive phase from seed production and dispersal to recruitment and growth. The final section looks at interactions between plants and competitors, herbivores and microbial symbionts, recognizing that these interactions may have an ancient evolutionary history.
Author: Todd K. Shackelford
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9783319196497
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This comprehensive, twelve volume reference work reflects the interdisciplinary influences on evolutionary psychology and serves as a major resource for its history, scientific contributors and theories. It draws on biology, cognitive science, anthropology, psychology, economics, computer science and paleoarchaeology to provide a multifaceted picture of behavioral adaptation in humans and how it adds to our academic and clinical understanding. Edited by a noted figure in evolutionary psychology, with many seminal and renowned contributors, this encyclopedia offers the full breadth of an area that is the forefront of behavioral thinking and investigation.
Author: Derek A. Roff
Publisher: Sinauer Associates Incorporated
ISBN: 9780878937561
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 527
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Book Description
Life History Evolution represents a synthetic approach to the understanding of the evolution of life history variation using the three types of environment (constant, stochastic, predictable) as the focus under which the theory is developed and tested. First, the author outlines a general framework for the study and analysis of life history variation, bringing together the approaches of quantitative genetic modeling and optimality analysis. Using this framework, he then discusses how life histories evolve in the three different types of environments, each of which presents unique characteristics. The theme of the book is that an understanding of evolutionary change requires analysis at both the genetic and phenotypic levels, and that the environment plays a central role in such analyses. Intended for graduate students and researchers, the book's emphasis is on assumptions and testing of models. Mathematical processes are described, but mathematical derivations are kept to a minimum. Each chapter includes a summary, and boxes provide supplementary material.
Author: John L. Harper
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 928
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Book Description
This book, written in 1977, brought together for the first time, the current knowledge of plants that might be relevant to understanding their population biology. ¿This monumental volume did more than summarize the state of plant biology; ¿it linked the conceptual and theoretical developments in population ecology, mostly derived from the study of animals, with field observations and experimental evidence of population regulation and life history evolution in plants. ¿ ¿The field of population biology was already well established in the 1960s although with a clear zoocentric emphasis, however, it is because of Harper¿s work that the field experienced a veritable explosion, reached maturity and became a mainstream scientific endeavour worldwide. This field is so vast now that it would be pointless, if not impossible, for someone to summarise it. It is precisely because of this that PBP is as relevant now as it was in 1977. John Harper¿s style of highlighting unanswered questions and the limitations of both theory and empirical evidence served and still serves as foundation for research agendas worldwide. Much remains to be done in this field and this alone makes PBP an essential element in the library of every student/researcher of population biology, whether interested in plants or animals.¿ From the ¿Preface to the 2010 Printing¿ written by José Sarukhán, Rodolfo Dirzo and Miguel Franco.
Author: Walter Eanes
Publisher: Sinauer
ISBN: 9780878934133
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Evolution since Darwin: The First 150 Years comprises 22 chapters and eight shorter commentaries that emerged from a symposium held in November 2009 at Stony Brook University, USA. Thirty-nine authors from 22 universities and two museums in five countries write on areas of evolutionary biology and related topics on which their research focuses. Their essays cover the history of evolutionary biology, populations, genes and genomes, evolution of form, adaptation and speciation, diversification and phylogeny, paleobiology, human cultural and biological evolution, and applied evolution. The volume summarizes progress in major areas of research in evolutionary biology since Darwin, reviewing the current state of knowledge and active research in those areas, and looking toward the future of the broader field.
Author: Moshe Oren
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461462207
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
The Hippo signaling pathway is rapidly gaining recognition as an important player in organ size control and tumorigenesis, and many leading scientists are showing increased interest in this growing field and it's relation to cancer. The chapters in this volume cover virtually all aspects of tumor biology, because members of the Hippo Pathway have been associated with numerous well-established cell signaling pathways, just to name a few; Ras, Wnt, TGFbeta and p53. Moreover, Hippo signaling is not solely involved in regulating “classic” tumor characteristics such as cell proliferation, survival and growth, but is also diversely involved in cell-autonomous and non-cell-autonomous differentiation, migration and organ size control. The primary audience are researchers interested in basic science in the areas of tumor suppression, cell cycle and size regulation, development and differentiation.
Author: Richard R. Nelson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674041431
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 456
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Book Description
This book contains the most sustained and serious attack on mainstream, neoclassical economics in more than forty years. Nelson and Winter focus their critique on the basic question of how firms and industries change overtime. They marshal significant objections to the fundamental neoclassical assumptions of profit maximization and market equilibrium, which they find ineffective in the analysis of technological innovation and the dynamics of competition among firms. To replace these assumptions, they borrow from biology the concept of natural selection to construct a precise and detailed evolutionary theory of business behavior. They grant that films are motivated by profit and engage in search for ways of improving profits, but they do not consider them to be profit maximizing. Likewise, they emphasize the tendency for the more profitable firms to drive the less profitable ones out of business, but they do not focus their analysis on hypothetical states of industry equilibrium. The results of their new paradigm and analytical framework are impressive. Not only have they been able to develop more coherent and powerful models of competitive firm dynamics under conditions of growth and technological change, but their approach is compatible with findings in psychology and other social sciences. Finally, their work has important implications for welfare economics and for government policy toward industry.
