Impacts of snowmelt timing and precipitation on the expression of vegetative traits and floral traits in <i>Ipomopsis aggregata</i>
Abstract
This study investigated the impact of water availability and snowmelt timing on the species Ipomopsis aggregata. We looked to discover if I. aggregata’ s traits were plastic, and if that plasticity was adaptive. The two questions we aimed to answer were: How does timing of snowmelt and level of precipitation influence the expression of vegetative and floral traits in Ipomopsis aggregata? Are the plastic responses of vegetative traits adaptive? We hypothesized that the traits would be plastic, and that the plasticity of the vegetetative traits would be adaptive. In order to analyze these questions, we measured vegetative traits including specific leaf area and trichome density, in addition to floral traits which included flower number, corolla length and width, style and stamen length, sepal width, 48-hour nectar production and nectar concentration. The experimental design included 6 10x10m plots, each with 4 2x2m plots within them. For snowmelt treatment, 3 of the 6 plots were covered with a shade cloth to cause the snow to melt about a week earlier than normal. For water treatment, the subplots within each plot were randomly assigned to water addition (50% additional precipitation), rainout (50% less precipitation), mockup (a control for the rainout structure with no prevention of precipitation), and control, which remained untouched. Corolla width, sepal width, nectar production, and nectar concentration were affected by the water treatments, while snowmelt timing had no statistically significant impacts on the traits. Although leaf trichome density affected the chance of flowering differently across the water treatments, none of the vegetative traits were plastic. Thus none of the observed traits demonstrated adaptive plasticity. This means that while some plant traits did react to the water treatments, we can make no conclusion as to whether adaptive plasticity may be a means for I. aggregata p opulations to persist in the varying conditions presented by climate change.
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References (10)
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