A Review of the Developmental Processes and Selective Pressures Shaping Aperture Pattern in Angiosperms.

Pollen grains of flowering plants display a fascinating diversity of forms. The observed diversity is determined by the developmental mechanisms involved in the establishment of pollen morphological features. Pollen grains are generally surrounded by an extremely resistant wall displaying apertures that play a key role in reproduction, being the places at which pollen tube growth is initiated.

Some (do not) like it hot: shrub growth is hampered by heat and drought at the alpine treeline in recent decades.

Premise: Mountain ecosystems are particularly sensitive to climate change. However, only a very small number of studies exist so far using annually resolved records of alpine plant growth spanning the past century. Here we aimed to identify the effects of heat waves and drought, driven by global warming, on annual radial growth of Rhododendron ferrugineum.

Accounting for stochasticity in demographic compensation along the elevational range of an alpine plant.

Demographic compensation arises when vital rates change in opposite directions across populations, buffering the variation in population growth rates, and is a mechanism often invoked to explain the stability of species geographic ranges. However, studies on demographic compensation have disregarded the effects of temporal variation in vital rates and their temporal correlations, despite theoretical evidence that stochastic dynamics can affect population persistence in temporally varying environments. We carried out a seven-year-long demographic study on the perennial plant Arabis alpina (L.

Common garden experiments in the genomic era: new perspectives and opportunities.

The study of local adaptation is rendered difficult by many evolutionary confounding phenomena (for example, genetic drift and demographic history). When complex traits are involved in local adaptation, phenomena such as phenotypic plasticity further hamper evolutionary biologists to study the complex relationships between phenotype, genotype and environment. In this perspective paper, we suggest that the common garden experiment, specifically designed to deal with phenotypic plasticity, has a clear role to play in the study of local adaptation, even (if not specifically) in the genomic era.