E&E seminar will be from Aiden Stanley from the Ashman lab will be presenting their research titled:
Title: Live fast, dry hard: Megadrought-induced changes in reproductive traits of two populations of Mimulus guttatus
Friday, March 12, 2025
A219B Langley Hall
12:00 PM
Climate change is altering abiotic conditions across the globe. While temperature increases are nearly ubiquitous, changes in rainfall patterns vary by region. In the western United States, rainfall is less frequent and more variable, leading to almost two decades of long-term, severe, “Mega”-drought conditions in California. While megadroughts threaten biodiversity across the entire tree of life, sessile organisms like plants are especially susceptible to long-term drought. Two predominant strategies have emerged: drought avoidance or tolerance. Drought avoidant plants germinate, flower, and senesce at an accelerated pace, before drought conditions become too extreme to reproduce. Drought tolerant plants develop slowly and invest in more vegetative structures to survive for longer. While annual plants may adopt either strategy, perennial plants may be predisposed to a tolerant strategy, relying more heavily on plasticity than evolutionary responses. Moreover, because climate change is leading to shifts in pollinator availability, drought and pollinator decline may shift plant reproductive phenotypes together. However, without directly comparing historical and contemporary phenotypes, we cannot assess the evolutionary trajectory of plants under megadrought conditions. The resurrection approach grows ancestors and descendants together in order to directly compare their traits. I will present the results of a combined resurrection and water manipulation experiment using two populations of Mimulus guttatus; one annual and one perennial. Both were grown under common garden conditions, with seeds collected prior to the megadrought and eight years later. We answer: How have floral phenotypes and reproductive allocation changed under long-term drought stress? We interpret the differences in response between the two populations in light of the opportunity for change during the eight-year period.