ABSTRACT. Urbanisation has led to increasing homogenization of plant communities across cities. However, it is unclear whether these patterns extend to cosmopolitan plant species at the genetic level. We examined genome‐wide genetic patterns in six widespread plant species (three Poaceae and three Asteraceae) across five cities in the USA (Boston, Baltimore, Minneapolis‐St. Paul, Phoenix, and Los Angeles) using reduced‐representation sequencing. We assessed genetic structure, differentiation, and patterns of isolation by distance (IBD) and environment (IBE) to determine if species were genetically homogeneous or differentiated by city, percentage of impervious surface, or both. Most species exhibited limited population structure overall, withPoa annua(annual bluegrass),Taraxacum officinale(dandelion), andCynodon dactylon(Bermuda grass) showing no significant genetic differentiation among cities, a pattern consistent with high gene flow mediated by human activity. Notable exceptions included city‐level differences inErigeron canadensis(horseweed) andLactuca serriola(prickly lettuce), especially in Phoenix. We also observed low genetic diversity inDigitaria sanguinalis(crabgrass) from Phoenix, suggesting recent founder effects or selection via environmental filtering.Erigeron canadensis,the only native species studied, displayed stronger differentiation by city, along with significant isolation by temperature and distance. Among all species, we found no evidence for population structure by impervious surface. Our findings indicate that widespread population genetic structure patterns of cosmopolitan plants are likely to depend more on species attributes (e.g., self‐compatibility) and human‐mediated dispersal than on urbanisation per se.
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Optimising Sampling Design for Landscape Genomics
ABSTRACT Landscape genomic approaches for detecting genotype‐environment associations (GEA), isolation by distance (IBD) and isolation by environment (IBE) have seen a dramatic increase in use, but there have been few thorough analyses of the influence of sampling strategy on their performance under realistic genomic and environmental conditions. We simulated 24,000 datasets across a range of scenarios with complex population dynamics and realistic landscape structure to evaluate the effects of the spatial distribution and number of samples on common landscape genomics methods. Our results show that common analyses are relatively robust to sampling scheme as long as sampling covers enough environmental and geographic space. We found that for detecting adaptive loci and estimatingIBE, sampling schemes that were explicitly designed to increase coverage of available environmental space matched or outperformed sampling schemes that only considered geographic space. When sampling does not cover adequate geographic and environmental space, such as with transect‐based sampling, we detected fewer adaptive loci and had higher error when estimatingIBDandIBE. We found thatIBDcould be detected with as few as nine sampling sites, while large sample sizes (e.g., greater than 100 individuals) were crucial for detecting adaptive loci andIBE. We also demonstrate that, even with optimal sampling strategies, landscape genomic analyses are highly sensitive to landscape structure and migration—when spatial autocorrelation and migration are weak, commonGEAmethods fail to detect adaptive loci.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1845682
- PAR ID:
- 10601209
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Molecular Ecology Resources
- Volume:
- 25
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1755-098X
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- adaptation ecological genetics genotype-environment association isolation by environment population genetics simulation
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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