Browsing by Subject "Hypericum perforatum"

Climate change is applying pressures to plant populations, which must adapt or move to retain fitness. A changing climate highlights the need for us to understand the potential that species possess to evolve in addition to any plastic responses. Approaches that allow the study of contemporary evolution, such as resurrection studies, have the capacity to provide insights into the responses of populations to these changes. In this resurrection experiment, seeds from seven populations of Hypericum perforatum collected from the UK and France, and their historic counterparts, were grown and subjected to four temperature treatments. Three traits were measured and compared between historic and contemporary populations: date of flowering, average seed weight and flower abundance. I found that temperature influenced date of flowering and flower abundance, leading to an overall earlier flowering time and an overall decrease in flower abundance with increase in temperature. The only significant difference between historic and contemporary populations was found in flower abundance - where, whilst flower abundance declined with increasing temperature, contemporary populations produced proportionally more flowers than historic populations per degree of temperature increase. These results suggest that plasticity allows this species to adjust its flowering phenology to retain fitness in warmer conditions but that evolution during the past decades may have selected for a decreased flower abundance at higher temperatures. These findings contribute to our overall understanding of how species have and will react under climate change, as we try to disentangle the roles that plasticity and evolution play in enabling populations to retain fitness under changing conditions.