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Trait plasticity and covariance along a continuous soil moisture gradient

View ORCID ProfileJ. Grey Monroe, Haoran Cai, David L. Des Marais
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.17.952853
J. Grey Monroe
1, Davis, USA
4Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tubingen, DE
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  • ORCID record for J. Grey Monroe
  • For correspondence: gmonroe@ucdavis.edu
Haoran Cai
2Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
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David L. Des Marais
2Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
3The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. Boston, MA, USA
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Abstract

Water availability is perhaps the greatest environmental determinant of plant yield and fitness. However, our understanding of plant-water relations is limited because it is primarily informed by experiments considering soil moisture variability at two discrete levels – wet and dry – rather than as a continuously varying environmental gradient. Here we used experimental and statistical methods based on function-valued traits to explore responses to a continuous soil moisture gradient in physiological and morphological traits in two species and five genotypes each of the model grass Brachypodium. We find that most traits exhibit non-linear responses to soil moisture variability. We also observe differences in the shape of these non-linear responses between traits, species, and genotypes. Emergent phenomena arise from this variation including changes in trait correlations and evolutionary constraints as a function of soil moisture. These results point to the importance of considering non-linearity in plant-water relations to understand plastic and evolutionary responses to changing climates.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • Version 5 of this preprint has been peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community In Evolutionary Biology (https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.evolbiol.100119)

  • https://github.com/greymonroe/brachypodium_fvt

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted January 17, 2021.
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Trait plasticity and covariance along a continuous soil moisture gradient
J. Grey Monroe, Haoran Cai, David L. Des Marais
bioRxiv 2020.02.17.952853; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.17.952853
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Trait plasticity and covariance along a continuous soil moisture gradient
J. Grey Monroe, Haoran Cai, David L. Des Marais
bioRxiv 2020.02.17.952853; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.17.952853

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