1,001 ways to live, die, and reproduce as a flowering plant: the evolutionary demography of angiosperms

Compared to animals, flowering plants exhibit a staggering diversity of reproductive form and function, from combined to separate sexes (and nearly everything between), outcrossing to self-fertilization, and a bewildering array of floral architectures to achieve pollination by animal or abiotic vectors.

The evolutionary consequences of flowering plant reproductive diversity are incredibly broad, but most theory seeking to understand them ignores the demographic processes of birth and death which link life histories, population dynamics, and evolutionary change.

I will be developing a new evolutionary demographic matrix modeling framework that correctly considers essential biological realities of reproduction via pollination, and the joint contributions of male- and female-reproductive success to individual fitness in hermaphrodite populations.

The new theory will tackle three key questions: (i) What are the demographic costs of sexual conflict across the tree of life? (ii) What are the eco-evolutionary consequences of pollen-limitation of seed production? (iii) What are the joint evolutionary and demographic consequences of inbreeding?

Crucially, the models I am developing are easily integrated with empirical data, a feature I will leverage by surveying demographic databases to ground my theoretical predictions in the biology of real populations.

This research will integrate demography with the evolutionary ecology of flowering plant reproduction, bridging the two fields.