title: The floral morphospace--a modern comparative approach to study angiosperm evolution.
abstract: Morphospaces are mathematical representations used for studying the evolution of morphological diversity and for the evaluation of evolved shapes among theoretically possible ones. Although widely used in zoology, they--with few exceptions--have been disregarded in plant science and in particular in the study of broad-scale patterns of floral structure and evolution. Here we provide basic information on the morphospace approach; we review earlier morphospace applications in plant science; and as a practical example, we construct and analyze a floral morphospace. Morphospaces are usually visualized with the help of ordination methods such as principal component analysis (PCA) or nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS). The results of these analyses are then coupled with disparity indices that describe the spread of taxa in the space. We discuss these methods and apply modern statistical tools to the first and only angiosperm-wide floral morphospace published by Stebbins in 1951. Despite the incompleteness of Stebbins’ original dataset, our analyses highlight major, angiosperm-wide trends in the diversity of flower morphology and thereby demonstrate the power of this previously neglected approach in plant science.
authors.forename: Marion
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Chartier
authors.forename: Florian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Jabbour
authors.forename: Sylvain
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gerber
authors.forename: Philipp
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Mitteroecker
authors.forename: Hervé
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Sauquet
authors.forename: Maria
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: von Balthazar
authors.forename: Yannick
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Staedler
authors.forename: Peter R
authors.initials: PR
authors.lastname: Crane
authors.forename: Jürg
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Schönenberger
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D016208:Databases, Factual; D004463:Ecology; D035264:Flowers / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000502:physiology*; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods; D019684:Magnoliopsida / Q000502:physiology*; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D025341:Principal Component Analysis