Effects of pollination levels on demographic vital rates in plants 2019
Plant Ecology Lab

Ecology, Population Biology, Reproductive Biology

As part of an ongoing project that is asking about the effects of changes in pollination on plant population dynamics, we apply pollination treatments to a sample of tagged plants: decreased, increased, and control.  We measure all of their demographic vital rates (survival, vegetative growth, and reproduction) in each treatment, and this information gets put into a population model.  We are currently processing fruits and counting seeds to determine the effects of our treatments on plant reproduction.  We now have two years of data, and students can help process fruits to ask about how the different treatments affect plant reproduction, in addition to growth and survival.  This study takes place in subalpine meadows in Colorado, at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory.  This project is important because it aims to understand the consequences of declining pollinator populations.