How plants develop adaptive strategies to efficiently use nutrients on infertile soils is an important topic in plant ecology. It has been suggested that, with decreasing phosphorus (P) availability, plants increase photosynthetic P-use efficiency (PPUE) (i.e., the ratio of instantaneous photosynthetic carbon assimilation rate per unit foliar P). However, the mechanism to increase PPUE remains ...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Serpentine soils have attracted the attention of evolutionary biologists for decades because of their high number of rare and endemic taxa, though less is known about the ecological factors that govern the diversity and composition of serpentine communities. Theory suggests that vegetation on these low-productivity soils will be relatively resilient to fire, the most common...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Serpentine soils provide a highly selective substrate for plant colonization and growth and represent an ideal system for studying the evolution of plant-ecotypes. In the present study the aim was to identify the genetic architecture of morphological traits distinguishing serpentine and non-serpentine ecotypes of Silene vulgaris. METHODS Using an F(2) mapping population de...

Although adaptive plant population divergence across contrasting soil conditions is often driven by abiotic soil factors, natural enemies may also contribute. Cryptic matching to the native soil color is a form of defensive camouflage that seeds can use to avoid detection by seed predators. The legume Acmispon wrangelianus occurs across a variety of gray-green serpentine soils and brown nonserp...

Natural habitats vary in the degree to which they are invaded by exotic species, but it is unclear whether they differ in the mechanisms underlying the spatial spread of a given exotic species. To compare the dynamics of invasion in highly invaded nonserpentine oak woodlands and less-invaded serpentine habitats, we used an historical ‘‘experiment’’ consisting of the introduction of several nonn...

Streptanthus is a genus of ca. 35 species in the tribe Thelypodieae (Brassicaceae) that has remarkable morphological and ecological diversity, a large number of species in the group being edaphic specialists endemic to unusual soils such as serpentine. While ecological research has shed some light on adaptation to serpentine in Streptanthus, there have been few insights on the origins and evolu...

Santa Clara, Limeport, and Berkeley are Arabidopsis thaliana accessions previously identified as diversely metal resistant. Yet these same accessions were determined to be genetically indistinguishable from the metal sensitive Col-0. We robustly tested tolerance for Zn, Ni and Cu, and genetic relatedness by growing these accessions under a range of Ni, Zn and Cu concentrations for three duratio...