Format: ORAL

Kyle W. Tomlinson1, Tristan Charles-Dominique2,3, Artemis Anst3, Theodore Lefbvre1, Mohammed Armani4, Uriel Glin5

1 Center for Integrative Conservation & Yunnan Key Laboratory for Conservation of Tropical Rainforests and Asian Elephants, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Menglun 666303, Yunnan, China 2 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Sorbonne University, 4 Place Jussieu, 75005 Paris, France 3 AMAP, Univ Montpellier, CIRAD, CNRS, INRAE, IRD, Montpellier, France. 4 Dept of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale Univ., New Haven, CT, USA 5 Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World (BIOCHANGE), Section of Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity, Department of Biology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Spines are a major ecological innovation supporting plant defence and diversification, present in over 10% of woody plant species. Spine anatomy is diverse, having arisen in multiple plant lineages from many different plant organs and parts of organs, which may be differ in relative advantaged across environmental gradients. We have tried to make sense of this diversity, by address the following core questions. 1. Do spiny plants possess functional trait syndromes that distinguish them from non-spiny plants, and are there differences between spines with different anatomies (spine types)? 2. Where are spines found in environmental space and are there differences between different spine types? 3. What is the evolutionary history of spiny plants? I will discuss our ongoing inferences about these topics and future directions we will pursue. In brief, our analyses show that different spine types have different functional traits, and differ in their distribution across climate and possibly soil gradients. Spines appear to have evolved in response to the evolution of particular mammal lineages on each continent, and that pre-adaptation appears to have been a fundamental part of their diversification in new continents. These combined results emphasise the importance of plant defensive architecture for the spatial distribution of plant diversity, and the substantive role of extinct mammals in structuring modern plant diversity.