Population climatic history predicts phenotypic responses in novel environments for Arabidopsis thaliana in North America

Abstract

Determining how species perform in novel climatic environments is essential for understanding (1) responses to climate change and (2) evolutionary consequences of biological invasions. For the vast majority of species, the number of population characteristics that will predict performance and patterns of natural selection in novel locations in the wild remains limited. METHODS: We evaluated phenological, vegetative, architectural, and fitness-related traits in experimental gardens in contrasting climates (Ontario, Canada, and South Carolina, USA) in the North American non-native distribution of Arabidopsis thaliana. We assessed the effects of climatic distance, geographic distance, and genetic features of history on performance and patterns of natural selection in the novel garden settings. RESULTS: We found that plants had greater survivorship, flowered earlier, were larger, and produced more fruit in the south, and that genotype-by-environment interactions were significant between gardens. However, our analyses revealed similar patterns of natural selection between gardens in distinct climate zones. After accounting for genetic ancestry, we also detected that population climatic distance best predicted performance within gardens. CONCLUSIONS: These data suggest that colonization success in novel, non-native environments is determined by a combination of climate and genetic history. When performance at novel sites was assessed with seed sources from geographically and genetically disparate, established non-native populations, proximity to the garden alone was insufficient to predict performance. Our study highlights the need to evaluate seed sources from diverse origins to describe comprehensively phenotypic responses to novel environments, particularly for taxa in which many source populations may contribute to colonization.

Cold stress and freezing tolerance negatively affect the fitness of Arabidopsis thaliana accessions under field and controlled conditions

“…A high importance of cold acclimation capacity was also found for forage grasses with a high correlation of freezing tolerance and winter survival in the field (Rognli 2013 ). For Northern American Arabidopsis populations, lower survival of more distant originating lines when moving north was found suggesting that the climatic history of a population predicts the phenotype (Samis et al 2019 ).…”

“…Pearson correlation coefficients (r) and P values are indicated. Accessions with description as well as their respective freezing tolerance (LT 50 ACC) are listed in Table S1 lower survival of more distant originating lines when moving north was found suggesting that the climatic history of a population predicts the phenotype (Samis et al 2019).…”

Natural variation on whole‐plant form in the wild is influenced by multivariate soil nutrient characteristics: natural selection acts on root traits

“…While natural selection operating on plant aboveground traits has been studied extensively (e.g., Caruso et al, 2017;Samis et al, 2019 supplemental materials), plant evolutionary ecologists have rarely investigated natural selection on belowground traits. Although studies of natural selection on roots are few, positive directional selection for traits such as root diameter and root biomass has been detected in several systems in controlled settings (e.g., Mitchell-Olds, 1996;Arntz et al, 2000;Volis et al, 2004) and for root length and Standardized total root length (cm) Relative fitness A B root angle in a interspecific competition field experiment (Colom and Baucom, 2019).…”

“…Here we examined wild natural populations of Arabidopsis thaliana in one region of their native range in Spain. Root studies in controlled conditions (e.g., Fitter et al., ; Wolfe and Tonsor, ) and large‐scale studies in the native and non‐native environments (summary table of Samis et al., ; e.g., Fournier et al., ; Hancock et al., ; Ågren and Schemske, ) provide an essential foundation for examination of belowground traits in this species in the wild. Additionally, Arabidopsis thaliana does not typically form relationships with macroscopic endomycorrhizal or ectomycorrhizal fungi (Bergelson et al., ); thus, architectural traits can be directly examined from excavated roots.…”

The relative role of plasticity and demographic history in Capsella bursa-pastoris: a common garden experiment in Asia and Europe

“…The distance, reported in Supporting Information—Table S3 , was computed on the principal component analysis (PCA) of the 19 bioclimatic variables, truncated to the first 10 principal components, explaining 94.21 % of the total variance ( Fig. 1B ; see also an alternative in Samis et al 2019 ). To investigate the effect of environmental distance, the following linear mixed model was fitted to the data:…”