During the summer of 2020, I designed an observational study to assess the extent to which reproduction in self-incompatible species is limited by spatial proximity to mates. While many researchers assume mate-limited reproduction is common in prairie species, few studies demonstrate this relationship in species other than Echinacea. I hypothesize that many self-incompatible prairie species produce few viable seeds because of small population size and spatial isolation from mates. To test this hypothesis, I selected 8 common self-incompatible native prairie species and 25 remnant sites within which to work. I quantified isolation in meters from the two nearest flowering conspecifics and collected seeds for more than 1,100 individual plants at 25 prairie remnant sites. I hope to complete lab work over the next 6 months where I will be cleaning and counting viable seeds for each individual plant. Results from this study will provide evidence about how widespread mate-limited reproduction is in self-incompatible prairie species.
Start year: 2020
Location: Douglas County, Minnesota; 25 roadside remnant sites Information about how many species of each species were sampled from each site, check out this file ~Dropbox/teamEchinacea2020/leaRichardson/siteCheckList8.29.20.xlsx
Materials collected: Seed heads collected from over 1,100 plants will be stored at the Chicago Botanic Garden but are currently in my Evanston apartment.
Data collected: Find data related to this project in the aiisummer2020 repository in ~aiisummer2020/plasInRems/leaStuff/
Leave a Reply