Chartier Marion, Jabbour Florian, Gerber Sylvain, Mitteroecker Philipp, Sauquet Hervé, von Balthazar Maria, Staedler Yannick, Crane Peter R, Schönenberger Jürg
New Phytol. 2014 Dec;204(4):841-53. doi: 10.1111/nph.12969.
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.
形态空间是用于研究形态多样性演化以及评估理论上可能的演化形状之间的已演化形状的数学表示。尽管在动物学中广泛使用，但它们在植物科学中，尤其是在花结构和演化的大规模模式研究中，除了少数例外情况，一直被忽视。在此，我们提供关于形态空间方法的基本信息；回顾植物科学中早期的形态空间应用；并作为一个实际例子，构建和分析一个花形态空间。形态空间通常借助诸如主成分分析（PCA）或非度量多维标度（NMDS）等排序方法进行可视化。然后，这些分析的结果与描述分类群在空间中分布的离散度指数相结合。我们讨论这些方法，并将现代统计工具应用于1951年由斯特宾斯发表的首个也是唯一的全被子植物花形态空间。尽管斯特宾斯原始数据集不完整，但我们的分析突出了全被子植物范围内花形态多样性的主要趋势，从而证明了这种先前被忽视的方法在植物科学中的力量。
