Changing habitats and hybridization i.e. recombination are the driving forces in plant evolution
Niels Jacobsen
Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Section of Organismal Biology, University of Copenhagen
Studying plants and populations in the field will invariably lead to the discovery of hybrids. It will also be found that hybrids occur more frequently in some plant groups than in others, and these hybrids behave differently in the different plant groups.
In order for hybrids to be formed, it is necessary for them to “meet” or at least be within pollination distance of one another.
In stable plant associations hybrids are found less frequently than in unstable plant associations. You could say that habitat changes act as a promoter and hybridization acts as an operator for evolution.
Besides studying these phenomena in nature, they can be studied with a much greater advantage in our cultivated plants. The study of the origin and evolution of our cultivated plants (ornamentals as well as crop plants) provides a mosaic of scenes of how the evolution of plants has taken and is still taking place.
The talk will be illustrated by a wide range of examples of flowering plants including among others genera such as Crocus, Cryptocoryne, Lilium, Hordeum, and Narcissus.
