Oral Paper

         Ecophysiology

Quantifying the physiological costs of flowers and their effects on whole-plant and ecosystem processes

Presenting Author
Adam Roddy
Description
For most angiosperms, producing and maintaining flowers for pollination is requisite for reproduction and population persistence. Historically, pollinators have been considered the primary agents of selection acting on flowers. Yet, the physiological costs of producing and maintaining flowers often oppose pollinator selection, and abiotic conditions (e.g. temperature, humidity, water availability) interact with floral traits to influence the total costs of flowering. Recent evidence has shown that abiotic conditions can have as strong an effect on floral traits as pollinators can.  With increasingly anomalous and extreme weather events and declining pollinator abundance, the physiological traits of flowers may become increasingly important in determining floral production and success.  Here, I present an approach to quantifying the physiological costs of flowers and how these costs may mediate physiological and evolutionary responses under global change, using data from temperate and subtropical plants. Despite originating from the same apical meristem as leaves, flowers often exhibit combinations of traits unique from leaves, which influence their physiological costs and responses to abiotic conditions.  These early results suggest that floral physiological traits may be linked to climate, and may therefore be important in determining species distributions and community assembly processes.  Yet floral traits are rarely included in most studies or in existing trait databases. I will further discuss how quantifying floral ecophysiological traits can be useful in understanding and predicting ecosystem and landscape processes.