Degree Type
Honors Capstone Project
Date of Submission
Spring 5-1-2018
Capstone Advisor
Jason Fridley
Honors Reader
David Althoff
Capstone Major
Biology
Capstone College
Arts and Science
Audio/Visual Component
no
Capstone Prize Winner
no
Won Capstone Funding
no
Honors Categories
Sciences and Engineering
Subject Categories
Biology | Life Sciences | Plant Sciences
Abstract
The spread of invasive alien plants continues to raise the overall threat to biodiversity around the world. The Enemy Release Hypothesis indicates that invasive alien plants are less regulated by natural enemies when introduced to a region (Keane and Crawley, 2002). Due to this, I hypothesize that invasive plants have more flexibility to allocate to photosynthetic ability, while native plants are required to allocate to structural defense in order to defend against more enemy regulation. To test this, woody shrub species leaves were collected and tested for nitrogen/carbon content, chlorophyll content, photosystem quantum efficiency, and fiber analysis across three seasons. As expected, invasive shrubs did produce higher chlorophyll content and greater photosystem quantum efficiency compared to native shrubs, indicating that the invasive shrubs did allocate more to photosynthetic capacity. However, fiber analysis indicated that native shrubs did not produce more fiber and structural components like I expected. Although native shrubs did not allocate more to structural defense, it is possible that resources could have been used for chemical defense instead.
Recommended Citation
Woolhiser, Lauren, "Seasonal Leaf Structure and Function Tradeoffs in Native and Invasive Shrubs" (2018). Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All. 1162.
https://surface.syr.edu/honors_capstone/1162
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
