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Effects of a Fire Response Trait on Diversification in Replicated Radiations

  • Litsios, Glenn Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne, Switzerland - Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Switzerland
  • Wüest, Rafael O. Landscape Dynamics, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Switzerland
  • Kostikova, Anna Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne, Switzerland - Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Switzerland
  • Forest, Félix Jodrell Laboratory, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, United Kingdom
  • Lexer, Christian Unit of Ecology and Evolution, Department of Biology, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
  • Linder, H. Peter Insitute for Systematic Botany, University of Zurich, Switzerland
  • Pearman, Peter B. Landscape Dynamics, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Switzerland
  • Zimmermann, Niklaus E. Landscape Dynamics, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Switzerland
  • Salamin, Nicolas Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne, Switzerland - Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Switzerland
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    2013
Published in:
  • Evolution. - 2014, vol. 68, no. 2, p. 453-465
English Fire has been proposed as a factor explaining the exceptional plant species richness found in Mediterranean regions. A fire response trait that allows plants to cope with frequent fire by either reseeding or resprouting could differentially affect rates of species diversification. However, little is known about the generality of the effects of differing fire response on species evolution. We study this question in the Restionaceae, a family that radiated in Southern Africa and Australia. These radiations occurred independently and represent evolutionary replicates. We apply Bayesian approaches to estimate trait-specific diversification rates and patterns of climatic niche evolution. We also compare the climatic heterogeneity of South Africa and Australia. Reseeders diversify faster than resprouters in South Africa, but not in Australia. We show that climatic preferences evolve more rapidly in reseeder lineages than in resprouters and that the optima of these climatic preferences differ between the two strategies. We find that South Africa is more climatically heterogeneous than Australia, independent of the spatial scale we consider. We propose that rapid shifts between states of the fire response trait promote speciation by separating species ecologically, but this only happens when the landscape is sufficiently heterogeneous.
Faculty
Faculté des sciences et de médecine
Department
Département de Biologie
Language
  • English
Classification
Biological sciences
License
License undefined
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/303244
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