Bridging the generation gap in plants: pollination, parental fecundity, and offspring demography
Abstract
Despite extensive study of pollination and plant reproduction on the one hand, and of plant demography on the other, we know remarkably little about links between seed production in successive generations, and hence about long-term population consequences of variation in pollination success. We bridged this "generation gap" in Ipomopsis aggregata, a long-lived semelparous wildflower that is pollinator limited, by adding varying densities of seeds to natural populations and following resulting plants through their entire life histories. To determine whether pollen limitation of seed production constrains rate of population growth in this species, we sowed seeds into replicated plots at a density that mimics typical pollination success and spacing of flowering plants in nature, and at twice that density to mimic full pollination. Per capita offspring survival, flower production, and contribution to population increase (lambda) did not decline with sowing density in this experiment, suggesting that typical I. aggregata populations freed from pollen limitation will grow over the short term. In a second experiment we addressed whether density dependence would eventually erase the growth benefits of full pollination, by sowing a 10-fold range of seed densities that falls within extremes estimated for the natural "seed rain" that reaches the soil surface. Per capita survival to flowering and age at flowering were again unaffected by sowing density, but offspring size, per capita flower production, and lambda declined with density. Such density dependence complicates efforts to predict population dynamics over the longer term, because it changes components of the life history (in this case fecundity) as a population grows. A complete understanding of how constraints on seed production affect long-term population growth will hinge on following offspring fates at least through flowering of the first offspring generation, and doing so for a realistic range of population densities.
Local Knowledge Graph (21 entities)
Related Works
Items connected by shared entities, co-authorship, citations, or semantic similarity.
Comparative impacts of long-term trends in snowmelt and species interactions on plant population dynamics
Density-dependent demographic responses of a semelparous plant to natural variation in seed rain
Is Plant Fitness Proportional to Seed Set? An Experiment and a Spatial Model
Data from: Is plant fitness proportional to seed set? An experiment and a spatial model
Data from: Comparative impacts of long-term trends in snowmelt and species interactions on plant population dynamics
Pre-dispersal seed predation obscures the detrimental effect of dust on wildflower reproduction - flowering and egg phenology
Growing Colorado Plants From Seed: State of the Art Volume III
Proceedings: Using Seeds of Native Species on Rangelands
Shrubland Ecosystem Genetics And Biodiversity: Proceedings
Cited By (72 times, 15 in Knowledge Hub)
Predicting the contribution of single trait evolution to rescuing a plant population from demographic impacts of climate change
Responses to climate change – insights and limitations from herbaceous plant model species
Comparative impacts of long-term trends in snowmelt and species interactions on plant population dynamics
Early snowmelt projected to cause population decline in a subalpine plant
The effects of climate change and biodiversity loss on mutualisms
Conditional Exploitation and Context-Dependent Fitness Consequences of Pollination Mutualisms
Is Plant Fitness Proportional to Seed Set? An Experiment and a Spatial Model
Facilitated exploitation of pollination mutualisms: fitness consequences for plants
Effects of road dust on the pollination and reproduction of wildflowers
Drought, pollen and nectar availability, and pollination success
Coyotes, deer, and wildflowers: diverse evidence points to a trophic cascade
Beyond biomass: measuring the effects of community-level nitrogen enrichment on floral traits, pollinator visitation and plant reproduction
Density-dependent demographic responses of a semelparous plant to natural variation in seed rain
Realized tolerance to nectar robbing: compensation to floral enemies in <i>Ipomopsis aggregata</i>
Interactions between nectar robbers and seed predators mediated by a shared host plant, <i>Ipomopsis aggregata</i>
References (35)
6 in Knowledge Hub, 29 external