The floral morphospace - a modern comparative approach to study angiosperm evolution

Autor(en)

Marion Chartier, Florian Jabbour, Sylvain Gerber, Philipp Mitteroecker, Hervé Sauquet, Maria von Balthazar, Yannick Städler, Peter R. Crane, Jürg Schönenberger

Abstrakt

Morphospaces are mathematical representations used for studying the evolution of morphological diversity and for the evaluation of evolved shapes among theoretically possible ones. Although widely used in zoology, they – with few exceptions – have been disregarded in plant science and in particular in the study of broad-scale patterns of floral structure and evolution. Here we provide basic information on the morphospace approach; we review earlier morphospace applications in plant science; and as a practical example, we construct and analyze a floral morphospace. Morphospaces are usually visualized with the help of ordination methods such as principal component analysis (PCA) or nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS). The results of these analyses are then coupled with disparity indices that describe the spread of taxa in the space. We discuss these methods and apply modern statistical tools to the first and only angiosperm-wide floral morphospace published by Stebbins in 1951. Despite the incompleteness of Stebbins’ original dataset, our analyses highlight major, angiosperm-wide trends in the diversity of flower morphology and thereby demonstrate the power of this previously neglected approach in plant science.

Organisation(en)

Department für Botanik und Biodiversitätsforschung

Externe Organisation(en)

Yale University, Museum national d'Histoire Naturelle, Université Paris XI - Paris-Sud, University of Cambridge

Journal

New Phytologist

Band

204

Seiten

841-853

ISSN

0028-646X

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.12969

Publikationsdatum

08-2014

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

106042 Systematische Botanik, 106008 Botanik, 106012 Evolutionsforschung

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Physiology, Plant Science

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/5ffc3215-0262-4c07-8867-7788dce5ce75