U.S.- United Kingdom Cooperative Science: Competition, Herbivory and Size Variability in Plant Populations

该奖项将支持斯沃斯莫尔学院的雅各布·韦纳博士和英国锡尔伍德公园帝国理工学院的迈克尔·J·克拉维博士之间的合作研究。该项目的目标是研究竞争和食草性之间的相互作用，以确定植物种群的大小变异性。这将通过两种方式实现。首先，研究人员将进行一项大型的多因素实验，研究植物密度和虫草对温室白三叶种群大小分布的影响和相互作用。这将使他们能够测试几个关于草食对植物大小分布的影响的假设，以及草食的影响是如何通过植物之间的竞争来调节的。其次，研究人员将使用新的统计方法来分析在锡尔伍德公园收集的关于兔子食草性疾病对冬小麦种群影响的大型数据集。这将使假设接受更严格的现场条件测试。这个项目将把克劳利博士的专业知识与食草学和韦纳博士在植物种群结构分析方面的专业知识结合起来。这项研究在锡尔伍德公园的表现尤其重要，因为有强大的研究人员在场。这项研究的结果将有助于我们理解产生植物种群大小变异的机制。

This award will support collaborative research between Dr. Jacob Weiner, Swarthmore College and Dr. Michael J. Crawey, Imperial College at Silwood Park, England. The objective of the project is to examine the interactions between competition and herbivory in determining the size variability in plant populations. This will be accomplished in two ways. First, the investigators will execute a large multifactoral experiment which will look at the effects and interactions between plant density and slug herbivory on size distributions in greenhouse populations of white clover. This will enable them to test several hypotheses about the influence of herbivory on plant size distributions, and how the effects of herbivory are mediated by competition between plants. Second, the investigators will use new statistical methods to analyze large data sets which have been collected over several years at Silwood Park on the effect of rabbit herbivory on populations of winter wheat. This will submit the hypotheses to the more rigorous test of field conditions. This project will combine Dr. Crawley's expertise with herbivory and Dr. Weiner's expertise in the analysis of plant population structure. The performance of this study at Silwood Park is particularly important, due to the strong research faculty present. The results of this research will contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms that produce size variation in plant population.