The floral traits of plants with specialized pollination systems both facilitate the primary pollinator and restrict other potential pollinators. To explore interactions between pollinators and floral traits of the genus Burmeistera, I filmed floral visitors and measured pollen deposition for 10 species in six cloud forest sites throughout northern Ecuador. Nine species were primarily bat-polli...

The genome rearrangement problem is to find the most economical explanation for observed differences between the gene orders of two genomes. Such an explanation is provided in terms of events that change the order of genes in a genome. We present a new approach to the genome rearrangement problem, according to which this problem is viewed as the problem of planning rearrangement events that tra...

THE ENDEMIC HAWAIIAN GENUS Trematolobelia (Lobeliaceae, or Campanulaceae, subfamily Lobelioideae) was erected on the basis of its distinctive fruit. This fruit has a seed-dispersal mechanism unique in the family. Assertions have been made by some workers that holes in the fruit wall are the work of insects, and are not related to the dispersal mechanism. This contention has been adequately disp...

We report the complete chloroplast genomes of three Adenophora species, and analyzed these compared them to five published Campanuloid plastomes. The total genome length of Adenophora divaricata, Adenophora erecta, and Adenophora stricta ranged from 159,759 to 176,331 bp. Among the eight Campanuloid species, many inversions were found to be only in the LSC region. IR contraction was also identi...

The evolution of thorn-like structures in plants on oceanic islands that lack mammalian and reptilian herbivores is puzzling, as is their tendency toward juvenile-adult leaf dimorphism. We propose that these traits arose in Cyanea (Campanulaceae) on Hawaii as mechanical and visual defenses against herbivory by flightless geese and goose-like ducks that were extirpated by Polynesians within the ...

The field of molecular systematics has benefited greatly with the advent of high-throughput sequencing (HTS), making large genomic datasets commonplace. However, a large number of targeted Sanger sequences produced by many studies over the last two decades are publicly available and should not be overlooked. In this study, we elucidate the phylogenetic relationships of the plant genus Burmeiste...

The Hawaiian flora, because of its great isolation, high levels of endemism, known lineages, and high rates of endangerment, offers unique opportunities to explore patterns of endangerment related to phylogeny, ecological and life history traits, and geographic patterns. Nine percent of the native flora of 1159 taxa are already extinct, and 52.5% are at risk (extinct, endangered, vulnerable, or...