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Premise 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 ofArabidopsis 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.
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Green plants (Viridiplantae) include around 450,000–500,000 species of great diversity and have important roles in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Here, as part of the One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative, we sequenced the vegetative transcriptomes of 1,124 species that span the diversity of plants in a broad sense (Archaeplastida), including green plants (Viridiplantae), glaucophytes (Glaucophyta) and red algae (Rhodophyta). Our analysis provides a robust phylogenomic framework for examining the evolution of green plants. Most inferred species relationships are well supported across multiple species tree and supermatrix analyses, but discordance among plastid and nuclear gene trees at a few important nodes highlights the complexity of plant genome evolution, including polyploidy, periods of rapid speciation, and extinction. Incomplete sorting of ancestral variation, polyploidization and massive expansions of gene families punctuate the evolutionary history of green plants. Notably, we find that large expansions of gene families preceded the origins of green plants, land plants and vascular plants, whereas whole-genome duplications are inferred to have occurred repeatedly throughout the evolution of flowering plants and ferns. The increasing availability of high-quality plant genome sequences and advances in functional genomics are enabling research on genome evolution across the green tree of life.more » « less
