Integration of attractive and defensive phytochemicals is unlikely to constrain chemical diversification in a perennial herb.

Diversification of plant chemical phenotypes is typically associated with spatially and temporally variable plant-insect interactions. Floral scent is often assumed to be the target of pollinator-mediated selection, whereas foliar compounds are considered targets of antagonist-mediated selection. However, floral and vegetative phytochemicals can be biosynthetically linked and may thus evolve as integrated phenotypes.

Pollinator-mediated effects of landscape-scale land use on grassland plant community composition and ecosystem functioning - seven hypotheses.

Environmental change is disrupting mutualisms between organisms worldwide. Reported declines in insect populations and changes in pollinator community compositions in response to land use and other environmental drivers have put the spotlight on the need to conserve pollinators. While this is often motivated by their role in supporting crop yields, the role of pollinators for reproduction and resulting taxonomic and functional assembly in wild plant communities has received less attention.

Differences in mating system and predicted parental conflict affect post-pollination reproductive isolation in a flowering plant.

Mating system shifts from outcrossing to selfing are frequent in plant evolution. Relative to outcrossing, selfing is associated with reduced parental conflict over seed provisioning, which may result in postzygotic, asymmetric, reproductive isolation in crosses between populations of different mating systems. To test the hypothesis that post-pollination reproductive isolation between populations increases with increasing differences in mating system and predicted parental conflict, we performed a crossing experiment involving all combinations of three self-compatible populations (with low outcrossing rates), and three self-incompatible populations (with high outcrossing rates) of the arctic-alpine herb Arabis alpina, assessing fitness-related seed and plant traits of the progeny.

Quantifying chemodiversity considering biochemical and structural properties of compounds with the R package chemodiv.

Plants produce large numbers of phytochemical compounds affecting plant physiology and interactions with their biotic and abiotic environment. Recently, chemodiversity has attracted considerable attention as an ecologically and evolutionary meaningful way to characterize the phenotype of a mixture of phytochemical compounds. Currently used measures of phytochemical diversity, and related measures of phytochemical dissimilarity, generally do not take structural or biosynthetic properties of compounds into account.

Evolution of floral scent in relation to self-incompatibility and capacity for autonomous self-pollination in the perennial herb Arabis alpina.

Background And Aims: The transition from outcrossing to selfing is a frequent evolutionary shift in flowering plants and is predicted to result in reduced allocation to pollinator attraction if plants can self-pollinate autonomously. The evolution of selfing is associated with reduced visual floral signalling in many systems, but effects on floral scent have received less attention. We compared multiple populations of the arctic-alpine herb Arabis alpina (Brassicaceae), and asked whether the transition from self-incompatibility to self-compatibility has been associated with reduced visual and chemical floral signalling.

Innate preference hierarchies coupled with adult experience, rather than larval imprinting or transgenerational acclimation, determine host plant use in .

The evolution of host range drives diversification in phytophagous insects, and understanding the female oviposition choices is pivotal for understanding host specialization. One controversial mechanism for female host choice is Hopkins' host selection principle, where females are predicted to increase their preference for the host species they were feeding upon as larvae. A recent hypothesis posits that such larval imprinting is especially adaptive in combination with anticipatory transgenerational acclimation, so that females both allocate and adapt their offspring to their future host.

Female fecundity variation affects reproducibility of experiments on host plant preference and acceptance in a phytophagous insect.

Reproducibility is a scientific cornerstone. Many recent studies, however, describe a reproducibility crisis and call for assessments of reproducibility across scientific domains. Here, we explore the reproducibility of a classic ecological experiment-that of assessing female host plant preference and acceptance in phytophagous insects, a group in which host specialization is a key driver of diversification.