Biology subjects

Rauschkolb, R.

Publications and source records attributed to Rauschkolb, R..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Seasonal variation mediates the importance of species attributes in plant-pollinator interactions

Predicting species interactions remains a major challenge, as multiple species attributes operate simultaneously and their relative importance may vary seasonally and with temporal resolution. Here, we assess how the relative contributions of abundance, trait matching, and phenology to plant-pollinator interactions vary through a flowering season and across temporal resolutions using interaction data from three European botanical gardens. We show that predictive models explain a substantial proportion of variation in visitation patterns, with floral and pollinator abundances consistently explaining most variation across the flowering season. Trait matching between pollinator body size and floral size also contributes to visitation patterns, playing a secondary but persistent role in shaping interactions, while phenology plays a relatively minor role at broader temporal resolutions but becomes more important at finer temporal scales. Additionally, null models accounting for spatio-temporal variation in floral and pollinator abundance reveal consistent patterns of pollinator preference and avoidance, indicating that abundance alone cannot explain the observed interaction patterns. Our results show that seasonal variation and temporal resolution differentially shape the importance of species attributes, highlighting the need for multi-variable approaches that account for temporal dynamics to accurately explain and predict ecological interactions.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

Garden, greenhouse or climate chamber? Experimental conditions influence whether genetic differences are phenotypically expressed

O_LICommon-environment experiments are important to study genetically-based phenotypic variation within and among plant populations. Such experiments can be performed in an experimental garden, greenhouse or climate chamber. However, phenotypic expression may be strongly affected by the environmental conditions and influenced by parental and storage effects. Hence, it is unclear if results from common-environment experiments are reproducible across multiple experimental setups. C_LIO_LIIn this study, we assessed the effects of three different growth facilities - outdoor garden, greenhouse, and climate chamber -, on phenotypic expression. We compared ancestral and descendant genotypes of the same population of Leontodon hispidus. We also evaluated differences in phenotypic expression between plants grown after one (F1) vs. two (F2) intermediate generations. C_LIO_LIWe observed strong differences among plants growing in different growth facilities. Furthermore, we found that descendants had larger rosettes than ancestors only in the greenhouse and they flowered later than ancestors exclusively in the climate chamber. We did not find significant differences between intermediate generations within the growth facilities. C_LIO_LIOverall, our study demonstrates that environmental variation among growth facilities can dictate the presence and magnitude of phenotypic differences. This implies that absence of evidence for phenotypic differences is not evidence of absence. Experimental systems should be carefully designed to provide meaningful conditions related to the research question. Finally, growing a second intermediate generation did not impact the genetic differences of ancestors and descendants within the facilities, supporting that only one intermediate generation may be sufficient to reduce detectable parental and storage effects. C_LI

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

Recent evolution of flowering time across multiple European plant species correlates with changes in aridity

Ongoing global warming and increasing drought frequencies impact plant populations and potentially drive rapid evolutionary adaptations. Historical comparisons, where plants grown from seeds collected in the past are compared to plants grown from freshly collected seeds from populations of the same sites, are a powerful method to investigate recent evolutionary changes across many taxa. We used 21-38 year-old seeds of 13 European plant species, stored in seed banks and originating from Mediterranean and temperate regions, together with recently collected seeds from the same sites for a greenhouse experiment to investigate shifts in flowering phenology as a potential result of adaptive evolution to changes in drought intensities over the last decades. We further used single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers to quantify relatedness and levels of genetic variation. We found that, across species, current populations grew faster and advanced their flowering. These shifts were correlated with changes in aridity at the population origins, suggesting that increased drought induced evolution of earlier flowering, whereas decreased drought lead to weak or inverse shifts in flowering phenology. In five out of the 13 species, however, the SNP markers detected strong differences in genetic variation and relatedness between the past and current populations collected, indicating that other evolutionary processes may have contributed to changes in phenotypes. Our results suggest that changes in aridity may have influenced the evolutionary trajectories of many plant species in different regions of Europe, and that flowering phenology may be one of the key traits that is rapidly evolving. Highlighted student paperWe demonstrated that accurately sampled and stored seed collections from conventional seed banks can, with some limitations, be used in a similar way as the increasingly popular resurrection approach sensu stricto. Given the vast availability of seeds stored in seed banks, this opens up a large potential for future research on rapid evolutionary adaptation to changing environmental conditions across a wide variety of taxa suitable for resurrection. Furthermore, this work is unique and novel, as we combine greenhouse experiments with molecular and climatic data to disentangle potential drivers for the observed phenotypic evolution, which, to our knowledge, was never done in resurrection studies.

evolutionary biology↗