Interplanting Floral Resource Plants with Vegetable Plants Enhances Beneficial Arthropod Abundance in a Home Garden

We examined whether interplanting vegetable and ornamental flowering plants reduces herbivory and enhances photosynthetic rate, plant growth, natural enemy abundance, and pollinator visitation relative to monoculture plantings. We found no evidence of physiological or growth costs due to growth in polyculture. Herbivore damage to plants did not differ with planting regime. Natural enemies occurred in greater abundance in polycultures compared to monocultures. Pollinator diversity was enhanced in some polyculture plots. We suggest that interplanting vegetable and flowering ornamental plants at small spatial scales may improve plant health and reproduction through natural pest control and a diversified pollinator pool

Correction to: GloPL,a Global Data Base on Pollen Limitation of Plant Reproduction (Scientific Data, (2018), 5, (180249), 10.1038/sdata.2018.249)

J. H. Burns was omitted in error from the author list of the original version of this Data Descriptor. This omission has now been corrected in both the HTML and PDF versions

Coexistence of Trichome Variation in a Natural Plant Population: A Combined Study Using Ecological and Candidate Gene Approaches

The coexistence of distinct phenotypes within populations has long been investigated in evolutionary ecology. Recent studies have identified the genetic basis of distinct phenotypes, but it is poorly understood how the variation in candidate loci is maintained in natural environments. In this study, we examined fitness consequences and genetic basis of variation in trichome production in a natural population of Arabidopsis halleri subsp. gemmifera. Half of the individuals in the study population produced trichomes while the other half were glabrous, and the leaf beetle Phaedon brassicae imposed intensive damage to both phenotypes. The fitness of hairy and glabrous plants showed no significant differences in the field during two years. A similar result was obtained when sibling hairy and glabrous plants were transplanted at the same field site, whereas a fitness cost of trichome production was detected under a weak herbivory condition. Thus, equivalent fitness of hairy and glabrous plants under natural herbivory allows their coexistence in the contemporary population. The pattern of polymorphism of the candidate trichome gene GLABROUS1 (GL1) showed no evidence of long-term maintenance of trichome variation within the population. Although balancing selection under fluctuating biotic environments is often proposed to explain the maintenance of defense variation, the lack of clear evidence of balancing selection in the study population suggests that other factors such as gene flow and neutral process may have played relatively large roles in shaping trichome variation at least for the single population level

PREDISSOCIATION OF THE A2Σ+A^{2}\Sigma^{+} STATE OF CARBON MONOFLUORIDE

$^{1}$W. P. White and C. W. Mathews, Twenty-fourth Symposium on Molecular Structure and Spectroscopy, 1969. $^{2}$W. P. White, R. M. Pitzer, C. W. Mathews, and T. H. Dunning, Twenty-sixth Symposium on Molecular Structure and Spectroscopy, 1971. Walter J. Steets is a NASA-NRC Resident Research Associate, 1974-1976.""Author Institution: NASA, Johnson Space Center; Lockheed Electronics Company, Inc.The predissociation In the $A^{2}\Sigma^{+}$ state of CF and the results of MCSCF calculations of the low lying CF electronic states have been described at previous $symposia.^{1,2}$ The width of the $A^{2}\Sigma^{+}$-X$^{2}\Pi$ (2,0) lines increases rapidly with rotational quantum number, $N^{\prime} > 35$. The ab initio potential for the predissociating state, $a^{4}\Sigma^{-}$, develops a barrier with a maximum near 3.5 $a_{0}$. We have calculated the vibrational overlap matrix elements for scaled potentials representing the $A^{2}\Sigma^{+}$ and $a^{4}\Sigma^{-}$ states. The line width pattern calculated from these matrix elements is consistent with the observed pattern. The influence of vibrational-rotational (shape) resonances of the $a^{4}\Sigma^{-}$ state on the line width pattern will be discussed