Plant Mating Systems goes to Free Access in time for the SAAB conference

Normally a year after they’re published issues of Annals of Botany become free to access. There’s a symposium “Pollinators as drivers of plant speciation” [PDF] coming up at the South African Association of Botanists Conference next week, so we’ve moved our own special issue on Plant Mating Systems to Free Access a bit earlier than usual.

As Jeffrey Karron et al. explain in their viewpoint piece introducing the issue, the issue covers three themes: the changes in morphology, phenology, and physiology that accompany the transition to selfing; the evolutionary consequences of pollen pool diversity in flowering plants; and the evolutionary dynamics of sexual polymorphisms. There’s also coverage of new techniques for analysing mating patterns in large natural populations, research on the dynamics of pollen transport, and investigations on the genetic basis of sexual polymorphisms.

One of the papers has already got international attention. We hope the other papers can also contribute to the discussion in Drakensberg.