Reproductive determinants of evolutionary and ecological success in flowering plants – FloweRS

What are the drivers of the astonishing diversity of angiosperms (flowering
plants) still remains an open question. The flower is clearly a key innovation
and the diversity of floral structures is also associated with diversity in
breeding systems. They likely influence diversification and the evolution of
other traits but in ways that remain to be elucidated. Modern comparative
methods allow identifying traits associated with increases or decreases in
diversification (=speciation – extinction) rates but very few traits appear to
have a consistent impact across lineages, space and time. Our working hypothesis
is that traits may often have conflicting effects on diversification, which can
arise because contrasted effects of a trait at different geographical or time
scales, because of the ecological context, or because of correlations among
traits with opposite effects. To address this challenging question we propose an
integrative and innovative approach to identify whether combinations of
reproductive traits could explain evolutionary and ecological success at
different spatial and time scales. We will organize the project in five main
tasks. 1) We will build an original database on floral and reproductive traits
in angiosperms that we will combine with existing ecological and genetics
datasets. 2) We will perform multivariate analyses on the set of reproductive
traits to characterize potential association forming integrated reproductive
strategies. 3) Using several genomic indices, we will evaluate the evolutionary
potential of the different strategies. 4) Using several ecological and
biogeographical indices will test whether some reproductive strategies are more
successful than others, and whether it depends on the geographic scale or
environmental conditions. 5) We will carry out macroevolutionary analyses to
test for the effect of traits on diversification by taking into account the
biogeographical, ecological and genetic contexts.