Mascha Bischoff

University of the Highlands and Islands | UHI · Environmental Research Institute (ERI)

Premise: Genetic variation influences the potential for evolution to rescue populations from impacts of environmental change. Most studies of genetic variation in fitness-related traits focus on either vegetative or floral traits, with few on floral scent. How vegetative and floral traits compare in potential for adaptive evolution is poorly under...

The global carbon neutrality challenge places a spotlight on forests as carbon sinks. However, greenhouse gas (GHG) balances of wood for material and energy use often reveal GHG emission savings in comparison with a non-wood reference. Is it thus better to increase wood production and use, or to conserve and expand the carbon stock in forests? GHG...

The global carbon neutrality challenge places a spotlight on forests as carbon sinks. However, greenhouse gas (GHG) balances of wood for material and energy use often reveal GHG emission savings in comparison with a non-wood reference. Is it thus better to increase wood production and use, or to conserve and expand the carbon stock in forests? GHG...

ABSTRACT: Organismal traits often influence fitness via interactions with multiple species. That selection is not necessarily predictable from pairwise interactions, such as when interactions occur during different lifecycle stages. Theoretically, directional selection during two sequential episodes, e.g., pollination and seed survival, can generat...

Flower traits such as flower colour, shape and volatile bouquet are shaped by a number of different factors, among them interactions with pathogens. Infection with the pathogen Candidatus Phytoplasma mali causes apple proliferation in Malus domestica, a serious threat for commercial apple farming. Apple proliferation is associated with a range of v...

Olfactory signals, often in synergy with visual signals, mediate the interactions between plants and animals. However, urbanization and agricultural practices are both sources of volatile organic compounds ( VOC s) and reactive oxygen species ( ROS ) that have the potential to interfere with plant–animal communication and to disrupt mutualistic int...

We studied biotically-pollinated angiosperms on Macquarie Island, a remote site in the Southern Ocean with a predominately or exclusively dipteran pollinator fauna, in an effort to understand how flower colour affects community assembly. We compared a distinctive group of cream-green Macquarie Island flowers to the flora of likely source pools of i...

Night-blooming plants with white, tubular flowers have evolved worldwide in association with long-tongued hawkmoths as pollinators. These plants include the wild progenitors of jasmine, gardenia, honeysuckle, tuberose and Easter lily, whose sweet, penetrating fragrances have long been important to the flavor and fragrance industry. The pioneering s...

Reproductive isolation due to pollinator behavior is considered a key mode of speciation in flowering plants. Although floral scent is thought to mediate pollinator behavior, little is known about its effects on pollinator attraction and floral visitation in the wild. We used field experiments with wild hawkmoths and laboratory experiments with naï...

The remarkable diversity of flowers in the angiosperms is widely recognised to arise from biotic pollination, although interactions with antagonists or abiotic stress factors may also shape floral evolution. Pollinator behaviour is thought to be among the key factors mediating reproductive isolation and thus speciation in flowering plants. Pollinat...

Background and AimsFloral traits, such as floral volatiles, can contribute to pre-zygotic reproductive isolation by promoting species-specific pollinator foraging. When hybrid zones form, floral traits could also influence post-zygotic isolation. This study examined floral volatiles in parental species and natural hybrids in order to explore potent...

Pollinators are known to exert natural selection on floral traits, but the extent to which combinations of floral traits are subject to correlational selection (nonadditive effects of two traits on fitness) is not well understood. Over two years, we used phenotypic manipulations of plant traits to test for effects of flower colour, flower shape and...

Seed production in natural populations is often limited by quantity of pollen received. This pollen limitation has the potential to generate natural selection through female function favouring certain floral traits (hereafter ‘pollen‐mediated’ selection). Floral traits can, however, also be under selection via other mechanisms, and the influence of...

Flowering plants in New Zealand have often been described as having predominantly small white or pale flowers, possibly due to an absence of social insects as a major pollinating force. However, insect vision is considerably different to human perception, and these hypotheses need to be assessed considering insect perceptual capabilities. We collec...

Pollinators vary in their relative contribution to the conspecific pollen deposited onto receptive stigmas, because of variation in both visitation rate and effectiveness of pollen transfer. Syrphid flies and short-tongued solitary bees are common flower visitors in alpine New Zealand, yet their relative importance as pollinators is unknown. We mea...

Highlights ► Floral scent of four Hawaiian Schiedea species (Caryophyllaceae). ► Floral scent of four Hawaiian Schiedea species (Caryophyllaceae) was analysed via GC-MS. ► VOC composition is similar to that of species pollinated by moths or saprophilous insects. ► The VOCs emitted suggest a transition from insect pollination to wind pollination in...

Hybridization between closely related co-flowering plant species is a common phenomenon. Among other factors, pollinator behavior can influence the rate at which interfertile plant species hybridize. Therefore the floral traits that influence pollinator choice and promote flower constancy are crucial in reducing interspecific pollen transfer and ma...

Although pollinators are thought to select on flower colour, few studies have experimentally decoupled effects of colour from correlated traits on pollinator visitation and pollen transfer. We combined selection analysis and phenotypic manipulations to measure the effect of petal colour on visitation and pollen export at two spatial scales in Wahle...

Despite a long-standing belief that insect pollinators can select for certain flower colors, there are few experimental demonstrations that free-flying insects choose between natural flowers based on color. We investigated responses of insect visitors to experimental manipulations of flower color in the New Zealand alpine. Native syrphid flies (All...

The interactions between flowers and the insects that pollinate them have fascinated scientists for more than 200 years. The last century saw the establishment of the fundamental concept of pollination syndromes which allows classification of flowers according to the agents that pollinate them demonstrating specialisation and co-evolution of plants...