Plants that have grown in partnership with human activity in meadows can be a great source of seeds for restoration projects, but their ability to germinate is also a problem.
Tag - Asteraceae
Fi Gennu
Spreading the risk over time – Dormancy in trimorphic achenes of a cold desert annual
Do variations in dormancy and germination across achenes from peripheral, intermediate and central positions contribute to the success of the cold desert annual Heteracia szovitsii?
William Salter
Mum’s the word* in new plant book
Chrysanthemum by Twigs Way 2020. Reaktion Books Ltd. Despite being a declared lover of plants, I didn’t include ‘mums’ – as chrysanthemums are commonly known – amongst the plants that I consider most interesting. It was...
Nigel Chaffey
Unravelling the genetic makeup of hybrid meadow knapweed populations in North America
Hybridization is thought to be a primary trigger of plant invasions, due to short term hybrid vigour of early generations or increased evolutionary potential in later generations. Yet despite widespread appreciation of...
Fruit heteromorphism and naturalization success in Asteraceae
Finding the factors that explain invasion success of species is a major objective in ecology. The combination of extensive data on fruit heteromorphism in Asteraceae and the largest global plant-naturalization database...
Alex Assiry
Do non-native pollinators provide services to native plants in Hawaii?
A lot of Hawaii’s plants are in trouble. A new study by Clare Aslan and colleagues says over a third are threatened or endangered. Why are they suffering? The authors decided to look at pollination. Has something...
Sexuality and apomixis in Hieracium are tightly associated with ploidy
Asexual reproduction via seeds (apomixis) is an important speciation mechanism in angiosperms, but its frequency is largely unknown. Mráz and Zdvořák used flow cytometric seed screening to unravel reproductive pathways...
How do pollinators paint the landscape with colour?
When you look at a patch of flowers, you often see clusters of colour. Even when a single species can have many different colours, you get patches. Why? How does a plant know to grow with this colour and not that colour...
Unmasking cryptic biodiversity in polyploids
Up to one-quarter of flowering plant species may have escaped recognition due to processes such as autopolyploidy-whole genome duplication events where polyploids may be morphologically identical to their diploid...
Variability of interstitial telomeric-like repeats in Mediterranean weedy species
A telomere is the region of DNA that marks the end of a chromosome. The protect the ends of the chromosome, and stop one chromosome from fusing with another. So finding something that looks like a telomere in the middle...
The cosmopolitan Compositae (or Sunflowers at large…)
Sunflowers by Stephen Harris 2018. Reaktion Books Ltd. Stephen Harris’ Sunflowers isn’t about sunflowers. OK, correction, it is, but it’s not just about sunflowers. Rather, the book celebrates the sunflower family, the...
Differential expression of NAM gene underlies diverse leaf forms in Achillea
This paper provides an important case study in the large family Asteraceae that contains almost one-tenth of all flowering plants and has an enormous diversity of leaf forms.
botanyone
Specialisation and modularity of plant-pollinator networks
Modularity is the tendency of certain species to consistently interact with each other. It is a ubiquitous and important property of ecological networks that can determine the level of specialisation of species within...
Robustness of floral organ numbers
Despite the contribution of phenotypic variation in floral morphologies to speciation, species diversity has been recognized by modal morphologies where variation is averaged out. Here Kitazawa and Fujimoto show a...
