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Lonicera floral traits change to adapt to environmental variabilities
  • +3
  • Wenkai Chen,
  • Jinniu Wang,
  • Jie Du,
  • Jian Sun,
  • Chunya Wang,
  • Yan Wu
Wenkai Chen
Chengdu Botanical Garden

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Jinniu Wang
Chengdu Institute of Biology,Chinese Academy of Sciences
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Jie Du
Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture
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Jian Sun
Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research Chinese Academy of Sciences
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Chunya Wang
Chengdu Institute of Biology,Chinese Academy of Sciences
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Yan Wu
Chengdu Institute of Biology,Chinese Academy of Sciences
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Abstract

Species in Lonicera genus are magic elves with excellent adaptability to varying environments with the aid of the divergent morphological and color pattern variation. Flowers undergo strong selection of both biotic and abiotic factors with species-specific morphology and color strategies. Take Lonicera nervosa (L. nervosa) and Lonicera tangutica (L. tangutica) as representative species, two sister taxa of Lonicera widespread in alpine to subalpine ecosystems in the same region, which present ideal subject in terms of evolution and adaptation of flowers to determine underlying ecological implications with close evolutionary relationship: (1) both species present differentiation in floral structure, corolla orientation and anther position; (2) L. nervosa has constant color while L. tangutica undergoes color change during florescence (3) Both species share the same pollinators, distribution and specimen coordinates show that the two species of Lonicera have similar distribution centers.