Data from: Specialization to extremely low-nutrient soils limits the nutritional adaptability of plant lineages
| Main Authors: | Verboom, George Anthony, Stock, William David, Cramer, Michael Dennis |
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| Format: | info dataset Journal |
| Terbitan: |
, 2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: |
https://zenodo.org/record/4962848 |
Daftar Isi:
- Specialization to extreme selective situations promotes the acquisition of traits whose coadaptive integration may compromise evolutionary flexibility and adaptability. We test this idea in the context of the foliar stoichiometry of plants native to the South African Cape. Whereas foliar concentrations of nitrogen, phosphorus (P), potassium (K), calcium, magnesium, and sodium showed strong phylogenetic signal, as did the foliar ratios of these nutrients to P, the same was not true of the corresponding soil values. In addition, although foliar traits were often related to soil values, the coefficients of determination were consistently low. These results identify foliar stoichiometry as having a strong genetic component, with variation in foliar nutrient concentrations, especially [P] and [K], being identified as potentially adaptive. Comparison of stoichiometric variation across 11 similarly aged clades revealed consistently low foliar nutrient concentrations in lineages showing specialization to extremely low-nutrient fynbos heathlands. These lineages also display lower rates of evolution of these traits as well as a reduced tendency for foliar [P] to track soil [P]. Reduced evolutionary lability and adaptability in the nutritional traits of fynbos-specialist lineages may explain the floristic distinctness of the fynbos flora and implies a reduced scope for edaphically driven ecological speciation.
- TableS1Spreadsheet containing raw data for all of the foliar and soil variables studied. Each accession is furnished with a species identity, a voucher number and a collection locality. All nutrient concentration (soil and foliar) are expressed in units of g kg-1, while nutrient ratios were determined on a mass-basis.TableS2Spreadsheet scoring (present = 1, absent = 0) the vegetation (columns 5-9) and geological (columns 10-14) associations of study species. The final two columns indicate the total number of vegetation types and geologies occupied by each species.beast_revisedBEAST xml file used to generate the phylogenetic tree for comparative analyses.beast_revised_mcc_newickBEAST maximum clade credibility tree used for comparative analyses.R filesZip archive containing the R code and associated input files used for the main analyses.