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Quirk, Zack J.
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paleobotany
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- Creator:
- Quirk, Zack J.
- Description:
- This repository is supplemental data (raw data) from my doctoral dissertation (2024). My research focused on how flowering plants respond to changing climates, not only with fossil plants in the geologic past, but also to make predictions on how living flowering plants will respond to human-derived climate change. We can examine these responses by examining functional traits, which are strongly associated with environmental and climatic factors. Studying functional traits in leaves is particularly helpful in this case, because they are a plant’s direct interaction with outside abiotic and biotic influences. I explored these plant-climate interactions in non-woody flowering plants (monocots) and ZIngiberaceae (the ginger family) because they are wildly understudied but have great ecological and agricultural importance. The research portion of my dissertation spanned four chapters (2-5). In Chapter 2, I examined the evolutionary and ecological impacts on a well-known leaf functional trait, vein length per area (VLA) in the entire monocot clade. This work revealed that monocot VLA was more associated with a plant’s environment and its habit (size/form), rather than overall evolutionary history. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 focused on Zingiberaceae. In Chapter 3, I tested leaf functional trait-climate relationships and dicot leaf trait reconstruction methods on fossil Zingiberaceae. I found that methods used to reconstruct leaf area and leaf mass area (important leaf functional traits) in fossil dicots were not comparable for use with Zingiberaceae, and likely other monocots. Leaf venation traits, including VLA and two new traits vein thickness (VT) and distance between veins, were largely driven by changes in temperature, which may provide useful information on past plant-climate interactions. In Chapter 4 I explored leaf functional trait response to elevated temperature and [CO2] in two species of living Zingiberaceae. Venation traits were largely driven by temperature, while stomatal and leaf mass traits were strongly associated with both temperature and [CO2]. This work provided potential implications for how living flowering plants may respond to anthropogenic climate change impacts and possibly offer a plant physiology model for fossil gingers, one that is not attainable with fossils. Lastly in Chapter 5 I focused on plant climate niches across the last 100 million years and explored differences in niche expansion and contraction in woody (Metasequoia sp.) and herbaceous (Zingiberaceae) plants. This work revealed that differences in climate niches are largely due to plant growth and dispersal strategies. My results call into question assumptions made for plant-based paleoclimate reconstruction methods, and recommend further training of these methods with additional plant groups. This dissertation provides new insight on living and fossil plant-climate interactions of monocot flowering plants, and lays the foundation for future research.
- Keyword:
- paleobotany, monocot, leaf, functional trait, and fossil
- Discipline:
- Science