My-Lan Le
Master's Degree Candidate
Moore/Hufft Lab
CU Denver Department of Integrative Biology
When: Friday, April 18th, 2025, 12:00 - 1:00pm
Where: North Classroom, Room 3207
Investigating Ecological Drivers of Reproductive Variation in an Endemic Alpine Plant (Physaria alpina): Competition, Pollen Limitation, and Habitat Variation
Many rare and endemic plant species remain understudied, posing a challenge for effective conservation. For my Master’s research, I studied the alpine twinpod (Physaria alpina), a plant species found only in select high-elevation areas of Colorado. I characterized habitat variation across multiple populations, tested how neighboring plants' abundance and reproductive status influenced the reproductive success of individual alpine twinpod plants, and conducted a pollen supplementation experiment to determine whether the alpine twinpod's reproduction is limited by pollen availability. I also recorded natural history observations of insect visitors, herbivores, and parasites interacting with alpine twinpod, which have become the first documentation of many of these relationships. These findings offer more insight into the ecological dynamics shaping reproduction in alpine plants, and can help inform future conservation planning for the alpine twinpod.