Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Plant Sciences
Combining the resurrection approach with transplant experiments to investigate adaptation of plant populations to environmental change
Published: 2023-05-25
Subjects: Evolution, Plant Sciences, Population Biology
Recent climatic changes, such as more frequent droughts and heatwaves, can lead to rapid evolutionary adaptations in plant populations. Such rapid evolution can be investigated using the resurrection approach by comparing plants raised from stored ancestral and contemporary seeds from the same population. This approach has so far only been used in common garden experiments, allowing to reveal [...]
Evolution of chemodiversity - From verbal to quantitative models
Published: 2023-03-27
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Plants harbour an astonishing amount of chemodiversity, i.e., diversity of specialized metabolites, at different scales. For instance, individual plants can produce a large number of different specialized metabolites and individuals in a population can differ in their metabolite composition. Given the ecological and economic importance of plant chemodiversity, it is important to understand how it [...]
Solar radiation drives potential demographic collapse in a perennial bunchgrass via dramatically reduced seedling establishment
Published: 2023-02-20
Subjects: Biology, Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Plant Sciences, Plant Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Many perennial plants in semi-arid rangelands have experienced population declines, and understanding the ecological and demographic processes behind these declines is important to slowing or reversing them. Although anthropogenic disturbances drive many declines, other sorts of environmental variability, such as the differences in solar radiation with aspect, may impact population success [...]
Understanding local plant extinctions before it’s too late: bridging evolutionary genomics with global ecology.
Published: 2022-12-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Understanding evolutionary genomic and population processes within a species range is key to anticipating the extinction of plant species before it is too late. However, most models of biodiversity risk projections under global change do not account for the genetic variation and local adaptation of different populations. Population diversity is critical to understanding extinction because [...]
Rethinking convergence in plant parasitism integrating molecular and population genetic processes
Published: 2022-11-17
Subjects: Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Photosynthesis has shaped the body plan, physiology, as well as gene repertoire of all plants. Shifts to a parasitic lifestyle evolved at least twelve times, leading to more than four thousand extant parasitic plant species. This transition has consistently left a major evolutionary footprint among these parasites. Otherwise rare features have evolved repetitively at the molecular level and [...]
Evolutionary origins of the Mesoamerican-eastern United States floristic disjunction: current status and future prospects
Published: 2022-11-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Biogeographic disjunction patterns, where multiple taxonomic groups are shared between isolated geographic areas, represent excellent systems for investigating the historical assembly of modern biotas as well as fundamental biological processes such as speciation, diversification, niche evolution, and evolutionary responses to climate change. Studies on plant genera disjunct across the Northern [...]
Deep reticulation: the long legacy of hybridization in vascular plant evolution
Published: 2022-10-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Hybridization has long been recognized as a fundamental evolutionary process in plants, but our understanding of its phylogenetic distribution and biological significance across deep evolutionary scales has been largely obscure—until recently. Over the past decade, genomic and phylogenomic datasets have revealed, perhaps not surprisingly, that hybridization, often associated with polyploidy, has [...]
When and how does photoinhibition matter for plant fitness?
Published: 2022-09-13
Subjects: Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The many biophysical factors that shape how plant species sort across environmental gradients may include photoinhibition, which I define broadly as oxidative damage that plants and other phototrophs risk incurring when they absorb excess light energy they cannot safely dissipate. Photoinhibition is seldom explicitly discussed as a potential driver of plant fitness and distributions. Here, I aim [...]
Heterostyly on Japanese Islands
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Botany, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Heterostyly is a genetically controlled floral polymorphism that promote outbreeding. Although many studies on heterostyly have been done in Japan, there have been no comprehensive analysis nor review. Here I present the list of heterostyly in the native flora of Japan through reviewing references. By using this list, I tested the difference in occurrence of heterostylous species among subgroups [...]
Maintenance and expansion of genetic and trait variation following domestication in a clonal crop
Published: 2022-09-01
Subjects: Agriculture, Bioinformatics, Biosecurity, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Clonal propagation enables favourable crop genotypes to be rapidly selected and multiplied. However, the absence of sexual propagation can lead to low genetic diversity and accumulation of deleterious mutations, which may eventually render crops less resilient to pathogens or environmental change. To better understand this trade-off, we characterise the domestication and contemporary genetic [...]
Sampling strategy matters to accurately estimate response curves’ parameters in species distribution models
Published: 2022-08-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Aim: Assessing how different sampling strategies affect the accuracy and precision of species response curves estimated by parametric Species Distribution Models. Major taxa studied: Virtual plant species. Location: Abruzzo (Italy). Time period: Timeless (simulated data). Methods: We simulated the occurrence of two virtual species with different ecology (generalist vs specialist) and [...]
High tolerance to zinc but no evidence for local adaptation in the aquatic plant Lemna minor
Published: 2022-07-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Duckweeds are a widely distributed and economically important aquatic plant family that have high potential for phytoremediation of polluted water bodies. We collected four ecotypes of the common duckweed (Lemna minor) from the four corners of Switzerland and assessed how their home vs. away environments influenced their growth. Additionally, we investigated their response to a metal pollutant [...]
A vegetation carbon isoscape for Australia built by combining continental-scale field surveys with remote sensing
Published: 2022-04-25
Subjects: Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Context: Maps of C3 and C4 plant abundance and stable carbon isotope values (δ13C) across terrestrial landscapes are valuable tools in ecology to investigate species distribution and carbon exchange. Australia has a predominance of C4-plants, thus monitoring change in C3:C4 cover and δ13C is essential to national management priorities. Objectives: We applied a novel combination of field surveys [...]
Plant families exhibit unique geographic trends in C4 richness and cover
Published: 2022-04-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Numerous studies have analysed the relationship between C4 plant cover and climate. However, few have examined how different C4 taxa vary in their response to climate, or how environmental factors alter C4:C3 abundance. Here we investigate (a) how proportional C4 plant cover and richness (relative to C3) responds to changes in climate and local environmental factors, and (b) if this response is [...]
The easyclimate R package: easy access to high-resolution daily climate data for Europe
Published: 2022-03-29
Subjects: Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
In recent decades there has been an increasing demand by ecologists for harmonized climatic data at large spatial scales and spanning long periods. Here we present easyclimate, a software package to obtain daily climatic data at high resolution (0.0083º, ~1 km) with R. The package facilitates the downloading and processing of precipitation, minimum and maximum temperatures for Europe from 1950 to [...]