ID: 613 / 204

Category: Symposia

Track: Pending

Proposed Symposium Title: UNDERSTANDING FLORAL EVOLUTION ALONG MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS: EMERGING PATTERNS OF MORPHOLOGICAL, SCENT, AND COLOR VARIATION. SESSION 1

Abstract: The increasing recognition of flowers as complex integrated phenotypes exposed to multivariate sources of selection has spurred considerable recent work to quantify this variation and its micro- and macro-evolutionary consequences. Floral morphology traits include those that influence access to floral rewards (e.g. corolla length and width), those that determine the mechanical fit with pollinators during visitation (e.g. length and arrangement of anthers/stigma) to ensure appropriate pollen placement and pick up off pollinator bodies, and those that affect the potential for self-pollination as a means of reproductive assurance (e.g. distance between anthers and stigma i.e. herkogamy). Flower color and scent traits, on the other hand, play a major role in advertising to pollinators and in some cases also in excluding other floral visitors that might be detrimental to floral fitness such as inefficient pollinators, nectar robbers, or floral herbivores. Moreover, all three groups of traits play a role in promoting pollen transfer between conspecific flowers, avoiding reproductive interference from other co-flowering plant species sharing the same pollinators, or contributing to reproductive isolation from close relatives in areas of sympatry to avoid potentially maladaptive hybridization. Floral traits can also be under the influence of other sources of selection, for example due to environmental conditions or interactions with antagonistic species such as herbivores. Therefore, flowers are constantly responding to these multiple selective pressures which creates intra- and inter-population trait variation. Quantifying this variation and understanding its evolutionary consequences is of great interest for pollination biologists and plant evolutionary biologists. This symposium will provide a forum for highlighting recent advances in the study of floral trait variation by a solid representation of researchers encompassing a diversity of career stages and study systems and thus it will be of broad interest to the IBC2024 audience.

Speaker 1: Rocío Pérez-Barrales, PhD. (Principal Investigator) University of Granada, Spain rpbarrales@ugr.es Talk Title: Flower trait evolution and pollination sharing in a community context.

Speaker 2: Yedra García, PhD. (Postdoctoral Research Fellow) University of New Brunswick, Canada yedragg@gmail.com Talk Title: Intraspecific variation in floral signals and rewards: the importance of considering different agents of selection.

Speaker 3: Hanna Thosteman (PhD Student) Lund University, Sweden hanna.thosteman@biol.lu.se Talk Title: Diversification of plant chemistry and pollinator interactions in Arabis alpina.

Topics (Up to three): Reproductive Biology

Topic 2: Plant, Animal, and Microbe Interactions

Topic 3: Global Change Ecology

Justification: Considerable recent work has quantified variation in floral morphology, scent, and color, as well as their evolutionary consequences in many angiosperm groups, thus, this topic should be of broad interest to the IBC2024 audience. We have payed special care to ensure a diversity of study systems and the representation of graduate student, postdoc, and PI career stages when conforming our symposium organizing team and the invitation of speakers.