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Variation in plant life-history and functional traits at between- and within-species levels has key ecological consequences, in which environmental settings impose strong selective pressures and play a vital role throughout life cycles. Our general notion for plant life-history strategies may be that, relative to tall, long-lived plants, short-lived species have features of small stature, small-seededness, rapid growth, and low seedling survival (k- versus r-selection). Rate of evolution may be an important agent of selection and annals evolve more rapidly than perennial congeners. These empirical observations prompt a suite of enticing questions, such as how do life-history traits interplay with functional trait at late stages of regeneration? what are the primary trade-offs in a cohort of key life-history traits that may have undergone stabilizing selection? and how do environmental filters differently affect adaptive trait variation in annuals and perennials? In this chapter, we intend to address aforementioned questions via assembling our updated knowledge with emphasis on seed mass and temporal and spatial dimensions of seed dispersal. Through such synthesis, we wish to raise awareness about life-history trade-offs and provide a holistic understanding of the extent to which climate change is likely to impact plant adaptation and eco-evolutionary trajectories of life-history phenotypes.
Plant Resource Allocation is an exploration of the latest insights into the theory and functioning of plant resource allocation. An international team of physiological ecologists has prepared chapters devoted to the fundamental topics of resource allocation. Comprehensive coverage of all aspects of resource allocation in plants All contributors are leaders in their respective fields
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.
THE EVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES THAT SHAPE ECOSYSTEMS In 1837 a young Charles Darwin took his notebook, wrote “I think”, and then sketched a rudimentary, stick-like tree. Each branch of Darwin’s tree of life told a story of survival and adaptation – adaptation of animals and plants not just to the environment but also to life with other living things. However, more than 150 years since Darwin published his singular idea of natural selection, the science of ecology has yet to account for how contrasting evolutionary outcomes affect the ability of organisms to coexist in communities and to regulate ecosystem functioning. In this book Philip Grime and Simon Pierce explain how evidence from across the world is revealing that, beneath the wealth of apparently limitless and bewildering variation in detailed structure and functioning, the essential biology of all organisms is subject to the same set of basic interacting constraints on life-history and physiology. The inescapable resulting predicament during the evolution of every species is that, according to habitat, each must adopt a predictable compromise with regard to how they use the resources at their disposal in order to survive. The compromise involves the investment of resources in either the effort to acquire more resources, the tolerance of factors that reduce metabolic performance, or reproduction. This three-way trade-off is the irreducible core of the universal adaptive strategy theory which Grime and Pierce use to investigate how two environmental filters selecting, respectively, for convergence and divergence in organism function determine the identity of organisms in communities, and ultimately how different evolutionary strategies affect the functioning of ecosystems. This book refl ects an historic phase in which evolutionary processes are finally moving centre stage in the effort to unify ecological theory, and animal, plant and microbial ecology have begun to find a common theoretical framework. Companion website This book has a companion website www.wiley.com/go/grime/evolutionarystrategies with Figures and Tables from the book for downloading.
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was based on the observation that there is variation between individuals within the same species. This fundamental observation is a central concept in evolutionary biology. However, variation is only rarely treated directly. It has remained peripheral to the study of mechanisms of evolutionary change. The explosion of knowledge in genetics, developmental biology, and the ongoing synthesis of evolutionary and developmental biology has made it possible for us to study the factors that limit, enhance, or structure variation at the level of an animals' physical appearance and behavior. Knowledge of the significance of variability is crucial to this emerging synthesis. Variation situates the role of variability within this broad framework, bringing variation back to the center of the evolutionary stage. Provides an overview of current thinking on variation in evolutionary biology, functional morphology, and evolutionary developmental biology Written by a team of leading scholars specializing on the study of variation Reviews of statistical analysis of variation by leading authorities Key chapters focus on the role of the study of phenotypic variation for evolutionary, developmental, and post-genomic biology
"The lack of discussion of the life histories of modular organisms is the weakness of this book that I most regret. . . . Modular organisms are different. " S. C. Steams: The Evolution of Life Histories (1992) Life-history theory endeavours to increase our understanding of the processe,s whereby the broad features of the life cycles of organisms, such as the timing and magnitude of reproduction, have evolved. Although reproductive traits have dominated as study objects due to their immediate importance for evolutionary success, much work has also been conducted on patterns of development, growth and senescence, as well as on the shifts in resource allocation related to these processes. The basic axiom of life-history theory is that patterns of life histories, such as reproductive traits, are subject to evolutionary explanation. This idea can be traced back at least as far as Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). In his discussion of plant domestication, Darwin wrote: "I cannot doubt that the continued selection of slight variations, either in the leaves, the flowers, or the fruit, will produce races differing from each other chiefly in these characters". Darwin was impressed by the success of plant breeders in moulding the growth and reproductive parameters of cultivated plants, and believed that natural selection could have a similar impact in natural populations.
The theme of this volume is to discuss Eco-evolutionary Dynamics. Updates and informs the reader on the latest research findings Written by leading experts in the field Highlights areas for future investigation
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.
This volume summarizes studies in experimental evolution, outlining current techniques and applications, and presenting the field's range of research.
Determining where species are distributed and what constrains those distributions are fundamental questions in ecology, and increasingly relevant to understanding ecological responses to climate change. Despite decades of study, however, we still lack a general understanding of the relative importance of climatic and non-climatic factors in driving species distributions. Functional traits may provide a solution, offering a way to generalize the constraints on species distributions and their responses to climate change. For example, ecologists often assume that a plant species' ability to tolerate harsh conditions, like frost, comes at the cost of competing for resources, potentially explaining where species can live across climatic gradients. To explore this topic, I conducted a greenhouse experiment using 25 plant species local to the Cascades of Washington State to test for a trade-off between two functional traits, frost tolerance and competitive ability. I also tested whether species differences in frost tolerance and relative growth rate translated to their current distributions, hypothesizing that high elevation species would be frost-tolerant but slow-growing, while low-elevation species would be sensitive to frost but fast-growing. While I found the hypothesized trade-off between frost tolerance and competitive ability across our focal species, I did not find that these traits varied by species distributions (high elevation vs. low elevation) as I had expected. Alternatively, differences in life form and family of origin explained differences among species in these two traits, suggesting that life history, long-term evolutionary processes, or both may play an unappreciated role in driving differences in these traits. In total, my results suggest that although these functional traits are related and may help explain how focal plant species respond to the direct and indirect consequences of climate change, the hypothesized stress tolerance and competitive ability trade-off may not provide us the ability to generalize those responses. Future studies could explore different metrics of cold stress tolerance and competitive ability, the physiological basis of resource allocation, consider whether trait variation is driven by relatedness, and validate these results in field studies.