Underground trees, a type of geoxyles occurring in Afrotropical savannas and grasslands, have unique and diverse ways of surviving in tough environments, according to recent research.
Tag - biogeography
Renata Cantoro
The mangroves the ice left behind
In the waters of a river in Tabasco grows a population of red mangrove: a lost world whose origins can be traced back to the last glaciation.
Agustín Ávila-Casanueva
A new study reveals how the Andes have shaped the history of aquatic plants
Researchers find that the rise of the Andes created conditions in the landscape that drove speciation in aquatic plants.
Lorena Villanueva-Almanza
Small herbaria make outsize contributions
Small herbarium specimens are likely to be unduplicated elsewhere, or found only in other small herbaria.
Erin Zimmerman
Citizen science data can complement collections well for some applications
The range and occurrence of anther smut shows very similar patterns in both collections and iNaturalist data.
Drivers of the relative richness of naturalized and invasive plant species on Earth
Why do some places have more invasive species than others? Essl and colleagues look at human action.
William Salter
Where did the first flowers grow?
Botanists have tried to understand the conditions that led to the evolution of the first flowers by reconstructing the niches from which the earliest flowering plants diverged.
Alun Salt
Recent range expansion in Australian hummock grasses
Large-scale environmental changes such as aridification have shaped and continue to influence the evolution and composition of biomes. As conditions change, organisms may persist in some parts of their ranges, become...
Geographical variation in damage tolerance: the case of oaks and weevils
The assertion that plants at lower latitudes should be better defended against enemies has a long historical basis but is still controversial. In the current study, Bogdziewicz et al. explore the interaction among holm...
Alex Assiry
The diversity and evolution of pollination systems in the Apocynaceae
Interactions between flowering plants and their pollinators are known to be responsible for part of the tremendous diversity of the angiosperms, currently thought to number at least 350,000 species. Using a new database...
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...
Fi Gennu
RAD-seq and morphology clarify evolutionary relationships in Eurasian bee orchids
Eurasian bee orchids (Ophrys, Orchidaceae) have become the most popular model system for studying reproduction via insect-mediated pseudo-copulation and for exploring the consequent, putatively adaptive, evolutionary...
botanyone
Biogeographic history and climatic niche evolution of Japanese endemic primroses
Climatic changes and historical orogenies during the Quaternary might have played a significant role in determining the speciation and diversification patterns of primroses in Japan.
Environmental niche divergence among dune shrub sister species
Geographic distributions of species are constrained by their ecological requirements. Chozas et al. study the distribution, environmental responses and evolutionary relationships of the three species of the genus...
