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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Defense Trade-Offs In The Evolution Of The Fruits And Flowers Of Genus Cornus, Danielle R. De La Pascua
Defense Trade-Offs In The Evolution Of The Fruits And Flowers Of Genus Cornus, Danielle R. De La Pascua
Honors Undergraduate Theses
The optimal defense hypothesis predicts that the allocation of plant defenses across plant organs is proportional to the importance of a given organ to plant fitness. Despite this, much less work has been devoted to the study of reproductive defenses in plants relative to vegetative structures like leaves. This study examines the apparancy hypothesis and the resource availability hypothesis using a phylogenetic comparative approach within the genus Cornus . During the 2016 growing season, plants of 25 species of Cornus were tracked for flower and fruit phenology as well as sampled for floral and fruit tissue in a common garden …
Placing Birds On A Dynamic Evolutionary Map: Using Digital Tools To Update The Evolutionary Metaphor Of The "Tree Of Life", Sonia Stephens
Placing Birds On A Dynamic Evolutionary Map: Using Digital Tools To Update The Evolutionary Metaphor Of The "Tree Of Life", Sonia Stephens
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation describes and presents a new type of interactive visualization for communicating about evolutionary biology, the dynamic evolutionary map. This web-based tool utilizes a novel map-based metaphor to visualize evolution, rather than the traditional "tree of life." The dissertation begins with an analysis of the conceptual affordances of the traditional tree of life as the dominant metaphor for evolution. Next, theories from digital media, visualization, and cognitive science research are synthesized to support the assertion that digital media tools can extend the types of visual metaphors we use in science communication in order to overcome conceptual limitations of traditional …