Keywords
Neoregelia johannis
light regimes
plant microhabitat
light intensity
How to Cite
Abstract
Shoot form varies among many bromeliads according to the light regimes. The authors tested the hypothesis that this type of variation in Neoregelia johannis occurs in response to mean amount of light reaching the plant microhabitat and is continuous. The 21 individuals marked in the field included individuals with the most extreme phenotypes available. Leaf length, leaf width, foliar surface, the number, length and width of spines on the leaf border, and the distance between successive spines were measured for each plant, as was the incident light (in lux) at the microhabitat of each plant at one-hour intervals of the day, during different months. Regression analysis was used to test the relationship between light intensity in the microhabitat and each bromeliad morphological variable. Leaf length decreased with the increase of sunlight in the microhabitat, whereas leaf width increased. As the amount of sunlight in the microhabitat increased, spine length and width increased, whereas their number along the border and the distance between adjacent spines diminished. The foliar surface decreased and the ratio leaf width/leaf length increased as exposure increased. The authors conclude that most of the variation in N. johannis shoot architecture can be explained by the variation in the light intensity under which each plant grows and that this variation is continuous depending on sunlight received during development.
Open Access and Copyright Notice
Selbyana is committed to real and immediate open access for academic work. All of Selbyana's articles and reviews are free to access immediately upon publication. There are no author charges (APCs) prior to publication, and no charges for readers to download articles and reviews for their own scholarly use. To facilitate this, Selbyana depends on the financial backing of the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, the hard work and dedication of its editorial team and advisory board, and the continuing support of its network of peer reviewers and partner institutions.
Authors are free to choose which open license they would like to use for their work. Our default license is the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). While Selbyana’s articles can be copied by anyone for noncommercial purposes if proper credit is given, all materials are published under an open-access license with authors retaining full and permanent ownership of their work. The author grants Selbyana a perpetual, non-exclusive right to publish the work and to include it in other aggregations and indexes to achieve broader impact and visibility.
Authors are responsible for and required to ascertain that they are in possession of image rights for any and all photographs, illustrations, and figures included in their work or to obtain publication or reproduction rights from the rights holders. Contents of the journal will be registered with the Directory of Open Access Journals and similar repositories. Authors are encouraged to store their work elsewhere, for instance in institutional repositories or personal websites, including commercial sites such as academia.edu, to increase circulation (see The Effects of Open Access).