Pollination Ecology of Primula
It was ever since Darwin’s work on heterostyly in the group that Primula has served as an ideal group with which to address evolutionary ideas. There are more than 300 species in China. Most of them were distributed in Himalaya-Hengduan Mountains, which is regarded as a biodiversity hotspot and a center of diversification and distribution for the genus Primula. However, the evolutionary forces driving the rapid radiation, speciation and coexistence of Primula species in this region remain undefined. In my master study, I compared intra- and inter-specific sexual organ reciprocity among the four studied species (P. poissonii, P. beesiana, P. bulleyana, P. anisodora) to discuss the functional significance of inter-specific sexual organ reciprocity. In populations of P. poissonii, I studied the fitness-related selection on floral traits. The eight populations of P. poissonii can be defined four pollination niches by using network analysis.
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Plant-Herbivore InteractionFragmented forest is an ideal system to study the drivers of herbivory and network structure. Fragmentation modifies physical conditions by, for example, increasing the ratio of perimeter to area, isolation, which might aggregate more insects (e.g., caterpillar in need of more heat). Fragmentation changes the structure and the appearance of a forest, and usually leads to changes in species composition. Thus, forest fragmentation is expected to affect herbivory levels and the structure of plant-herbivory network . These may involve many kinds of scale-dependent effects, such as species, community, and landscape level. Using statistical model and emprical dataset should and doses improve our understanding of both direct and indirect effect on herbivory and network structures in both species level and community level.
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