BACKGROUND The Three Gorges project has caused many ecosystem problems. Ecological restoration using readily-available plants is an effective way of mitigating environmental impacts. Two perennial submergence-tolerant ecotypes of Calamagrostis arundinacea were planted in an experimental field in the drawdown zone. Responses of the two plant ecotypes to flooding stress in the drawdown zone were ...

Genotypic variation at multiple loci for seed dormancy (SD) contributes to plant adaptation to diverse ecosystems. Weedy rice (Oryza sativa) was used as a model to address the similarity of SD genes between distinct ecotypes. A total of 12 quantitative trait loci (QTL) for SD were identified in one primary and two advanced backcross (BC) populations derived from a temperate ecotype of weedy ric...

DNA barcodes are widely used for species identification and biogeographic studies. Here, we compare the use of full mitochondrial genomes versus other fragments ecological analyses. Our dataset comprised 120 from genus Clunio (Diptera: Chironomidae), comprising five populations two closely related (Clunio marinus balticus) three ecotypes. We extracted cytochrome oxidase c subunit I (COI) partit...

Inhibition of photosynthesis and epidermal damage resulting from ultraviolet irradiation were assessed for arctic and alpine plant species. These species were taken from a latitudinal gradient of the arctic-alpine life zone from the Andes to northern Alaska, which spans a steep change in solar UV-B irradiation (280 to 320 nm). Ecotypes and species from the Arctic, where solar UV-B flux is very ...

During oil-sands mining all vegetation, soil, overburden, and oil sand is removed, leaving pits several kilometers wide and up to 100 m deep. These pits are reclaimed through a variety of treatments using subsoil or a mixed peat-mineral soil cap. Using nonmetric multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis of measurements of ecosystem function, reclamation treatments of several age classes wer...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The timing of flowering and summer dormancy induction plays a central role in the adaptation of Mediterranean geophytes to changes in the length of the growth season along rainfall gradients. Our aim was to analyse the role of the variation in the responses of flowering and summer dormancy to vernalization, daylength and growth temperature for the adaptation of Poa bulbosa, ...

The genetic control of gene expression during shoot development in Arabidopsis thaliana was analyzed by combining quantitative trait loci (QTL) and microarray analysis. Using oligonucleotide array data from 30 recombinant inbred lines derived from a cross of Columbia and Landsberg erecta ecotypes, the Arabidopsis genome was scanned for marker-by-gene linkages or so-called expression QTL (eQTL)....