BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Genome size is known to be correlated with a number of phenotypic traits associated with cell sizes and cell-division rates. Genome size was therefore used as a proxy for them in order to assess how common plant traits such as height, specific leaf area and seed size/number predict species regional abundance. In this study it is hypothesized that if there is residual correlation between genome size and abundance after these traits are partialled out, there must be additional ecological effects of cell size and/or cell-division rate. METHODS: Variation in genome size, plant traits and regional abundance were examined in 436 herbaceous species of central European flora, and relationships were sought for among these variables by correlation and path analysis. KEY RESULTS: Species regional abundance was weakly but significantly correlated with genome size; the relationship was stronger for annuals (R(2) = 0·145) than for perennials (R(2) = 0·027). In annuals, genome size was linked to abundance via its effect on seed size, which constrains seed number and hence population growth rate. In perennials, it weakly affected (via height and specific leaf area) competitive ability. These relationships did not change qualitatively after phylogenetic correction. In both annuals and perennials there was an unresolved effect of genome size on abundance. CONCLUSIONS: The findings indicate that additional predictors of regional abundance should be sought among variables that are linked to cell size and cell-division rate. Signals of these cell-level processes remain identifiable even at the landscape scale, and show deep differences between perennials and annuals. Plant population biology could thus possibly benefit from more systematic use of indicators of cell-level processes.

Institute of Botany Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Průhonice Czech Republic

Zobrazit více v PubMed

Aarssen LW, Schamp BS, Pither J. Why are there so many small plants? Implications for species coexistence. Journal of Ecology. 2006;94:569–580.

Arbuckle JL. Amos 19·0 User's Guide. Chicago, IL: SPSS Inc; 2010.

Beaulieu JM, Leitch IJ, Knight CA. Genome size evolution in relation to leaf strategy and metabolic rates revisited. Annals of Botany. 2007a;99:495–505. PubMed PMC

Beaulieu JM, Moles AT, Leitch IJ, Bennett MD, Dickie JB, Knight CA. Correlated evolution of genome size and seed mass. New Phytologist. 2007b;173:422–437. PubMed

Bennett MD. Variation in genomic form in plants and its ecological implications. New Phytologist. 1987;106(Suppl):177–200.

Bennett MD, Leitch IJ. 2010 Plant DNA C-values database (release 5·0, December 2010). http://data.kew.org/cvalues/ (accessed 14 October 2011)

Bennett MD, Smith JB. Effects of polyploidy on meiotic duration and pollen development in cereal anthers. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B – Biological Sciences. 1972;181:81–107.

Brochmann C, Brysting AK, Alsos IG, et al. Polyploidy in arctic plants. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. 2004;82:521–536.

Chytrý M, Rafajová M. Czech National Phytosociological Database: basic statistics of the available vegetation-plot data. Preslia. 2003;75:1–15.

Chytrý M, Pyšek P, Tichý L, Knollová I, Danihelka J. Invasions by alien plants in the Czech Republic: a quantitative assessment across habitats. Preslia. 2005;77:339–354.

Cornwell WK, Ackerly DD. A link between plant traits and abundance: evidence from coastal California woody plants. Journal of Ecology. 2010;98:814–821.

Craine JM, III, Froehle J, Tilman DG, Wedin DA, Chapin FS., III The relationships among root and leaf traits of 76 grassland species and relative abundance along fertility and disturbance gradients. Oikos. 2001;93:274–285.

Desdevises Y, Legendre P, Azouzi L, Morand S. Quantifying phylogenetically structured environmental variation. Evolution. 2003;57:2647–2652. PubMed

Diniz-Filho JAF, de Sant'Ana CER, Bini LM. An eigenvector method for estimating phylogenetic inertia. Evolution. 1998;52:1247–1262. PubMed

Dray S, Dufour AB. The ade4 package: implementing the duality diagram for ecologists. Journal of Statistical Software. 2007;22:1–20.

Eriksson O, Jakobsson A. Abundance, distribution and life histories of grassland plants: a comparative study of 81 species. Journal of Ecology. 1998;86:922–933.

Fourment M, Gibbs MJ. PATRISTIC: a program for calculating patristic distances and graphically comparing the components of genetic change. BMC Evolutionary Biology. 2006;6:1. http:dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-6-1 . PubMed PMC

Francis D, Davies MS, Barlow PW. A strong nucleotypic effect on the cell cycle regardless of ploidy level. Annals of Botany. 2008;101:747–757. PubMed PMC

Fridley JD, Vandermast DB, Kuppinger DM, Manthey M, Peet RK. Co-occurrence based assessment of habitat generalists and specialists: a new approach for the measurement of niche width. Journal of Ecology. 2007;95:707–722.

Gallagher RV, Leishman MR, Miller JT, et al. Invasiveness in introduced Australian acacias: the role of species' traits and genome size. Diversity and Distributions. 2011;17:884–897.

Goldblatt P, Johnson DE, editors. Index to plant chromosome numbers. St Louis, MO: Missouri Botanical Garden; 1979 onwards.

Gove AD, Matthew C, Fitzpatrick MC, Majer JD, Dunn RR. Dispersal traits linked to range size through range location, not dispersal ability, in Western Australian angiosperms. Global Ecology and Biogeography. 2009;18:596–606.

Grace JB. Structural equation modeling and natural systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2006.

Greilhuber J, Doležel J, Lysák MA, Bennett MD. The origin, evolution and proposed stabilization of the terms ‘genome size’ and ‘C-value’ to describe nuclear DNA contents. Annals of Botany. 2005;95:255–260. PubMed PMC

Greilhuber J, Borsch T, Müller K, Worberg A, Porembski S, Barthlott W. Smallest angiosperm genomes found in Lentibulariaceae, with chromosomes of bacterial size. Plant Biology. 2006;8:770–777. PubMed

Grime JP. Plant classification for ecological purposes: is there a role for genome size? Annals of Botany. 1998;82(Suppl. A):117–120.

Gross N, Kunstler G, Liancourt P, de Bello F, Suding KN, Lavorel S. Linking individual response to biotic interactions with community structure: a trait-based framework. Functional Ecology. 2009;23:1167–1178.

Grotkopp E, Rejmánek M. High seedling relative growth rate and specific leaf area are traits of invasive species: phylogenetically independent contrasts of woody angiosperms. American Journal of Botany. 2007;94:526–532. PubMed

Grotkopp E, Rejmánek M, Sanderson MJ, Rost TL. Evolution of genome size in pines (Pinus) and its life-history correlates: supertree analyses. Evolution. 2004;58:1705–1729. PubMed

Hodgson JG, Sharafi M, Jalili A, et al. Stomatal vs. genome size in angiosperms: the somatic tail wagging the genomic dog? Annals of Botany. 2010;105:573–584. PubMed PMC

van Kleunen M, Weber E, Fischer M. A meta-analysis of trait differences between invasive and non-invasive plant species. Ecology Letters. 2010;13:235–245. PubMed

Kleyer M, Bekker RM, Knevel IC, et al. The LEDA Traitbase: a database of life-history traits of the Northwest European flora. Journal of Ecology. 2008;96:1266–1274.

Knight CA, Beaulieu JM. Genome size scaling through phenotype space. Annals of Botany. 2008;101:759–766. PubMed PMC

Knight CA, Molinari NA, Petrov DA. The large genome constraint hypothesis: evolution, ecology and phenotype. Annals of Botany. 2005;95:177–190. PubMed PMC

Kolb A, Barsch F, Diekmann M. Determinants of local abundance and range size in forest vascular plants. Global Ecology and Biogeography. 2006;15:237–247.

Kubát K, Hrouda L, Chrtek J, Jr, Kaplan Z, Kirschner J, Štěpánek J. Klíč ke květeně České republiky [Key to the flora of the Czech Republic] Praha: Academia; 2002.

Kubešová M, Moravcová L, Suda J, Jarošík V, Pyšek P. Invasive species do not contrast with the general pattern of genome size in angiosperms but have smaller genomes than their non-invasive congeners. Preslia. 2010;82:81–96.

Lavergne S, Muenke NJ, Molofsky J. Genome size reduction can trigger rapid phenotypic evolution in invasive plants. Annals of Botany. 2010;105:109–116. PubMed PMC

Leitch IJ, Bennett MD. Genome size and its uses: the impact of flow cytometry. In: Doležel J, Greilhuber J, Suda J, editors. Flow cytometry with plant cells. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH; 2007. pp. 153–176.

Metcalf JC, Rose KE, Rees M. Evolutionary demography of monocarpic perennials. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 2003;18:471–480.

Morgan HD, Westoby M. The relationship between nuclear DNA content and leaf strategy in seed plants. Annals of Botany. 2005;96:1321–1330. PubMed PMC

Murray BR, Thrall PH, Gill AM, Nicotra AB. How plant life-history and ecological traits relate to species rarity and commonness at varying spatial scales. Austral Ecology. 2002;27:291–310.

Niklfeld H. Rote Listen gefährdeter Pflanzen Österreichs. Graz: Austria Medien Service; 1999.

Ozinga WA, Römermann C, Bekker RM, et al. Dispersal failure contributes to plant losses in NW Europe. Ecology Letters. 2009;12:66–74. PubMed

Pellicer J, Fay MF, Leitch IJ. The largest eukaryotic genome of them all? Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society. 2010;164:10–15.

Pyšek P, Sádlo J, Mandák B. Catalogue of alien plants of the Czech Republic. Preslia. 2002;74:97–186.

Pyšek P, Jarošík V, Pergl J, et al. The global invasion success of Central European plants is related to distribution characteristics in their native range and species traits. Diversity and Distributions. 2009;15:891–903.

Reich PB, Walters MB, Ellsworth DS. Leaf life-span in relation to leaf, plant, and stand characteristics among diverse ecosystems. Ecological Monographs. 1992;62:365–392.

Reich PB, Ellsworth DS, Walters MB. Leaf structure (specific leaf area) modulates photosynthesis–nitrogen relations: evidence from within and across species and functional groups. Functional Ecology. 1998;12:948–958.

Silvertown J, Franco M, Pisanty I, Mendoza A. Comparative plant demography – relative importance of life-cycle components to the finite rate of increase in woody and herbaceous perennials. Journal of Ecology. 1993;81:465–476.

Šímová I, Herben T. Geometrical constraints in the scaling relationships between genome size, cell size and cell cycle length in herbaceous plants. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B – Biological Sciences. 2012;279:867–875. PubMed PMC

Soltis DE, Albert VA, Leebens-Mack J, et al. Polyploidy and angiosperm diversification. American Journal of Botany. 2009;96:336–348. PubMed

Suda J, Kyncl T, Jarolímová V. Genome size variation in Macaronesian angiosperms: forty percent of the Canarian endemic flora completed. Plant Systematics and Evolution. 2005;252:215–238.

Suding KN, Goldberg DE, Hartman KM. Relationships among species traits: separating levels of response and identifying linkages to abundance. Ecology. 2003;84:1–16.

Swofford DL. PAUP*. Phylogenetic analysis using parsimony (*and other methods). Version 4. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates; 2003.

Thompson K. Genome size, seed size and germination temperature in herbaceous angiosperms. Evolutionary Trends in Plants. 1990;4:113–116.

Thompson K, Band SR, Hodgson JG. Seed size and shape predict persistence in soil. Functional Ecology. 1993;7:236–241.

Thompson K, Gaston KJ, Band SR. Range size, dispersal and niche breadth in the herbaceous flora of central England. Journal of Ecology. 1999;87:150–155.

van der Veken S, Bellemare J, Verheyen K, Hermy M. Life-history traits are correlated with geographical distribution patterns of western European forest herb species. Journal of Biogeography. 2007;34:1723–1735.

Whitney KD, Baack EJ, Hamrick JL, et al. A role for nonadaptive processes in plant genome size evolution? Evolution. 2010;64:2087–2109. PubMed

Vinogradov AE. Selfish DNA is maladaptive: evidence from the plant Red List. Trends in Genetics. 2003;19:609–614. PubMed

Wright IJ, Westoby M. Differences in seedling growth behaviour among species: trait correlations across species, and trait shifts along nutrient compared to rainfall gradients. Journal of Ecology. 1999;87:85–97.

Zalewski M, Ciurzycki W. Does genome size explain rarity in beetles? The case from Coccinelidae and Chrysomelidae families. Polish Journal of Ecology. 2010;58:585–591.

Zelený D. Co-occurrence based assessment of species habitat specialization is affected by the size of species pool: reply to Fridley et al. (2007) Journal of Ecology. 2008;97:10–17.

Clonal growth and plant species abundance

DNA content variation and its significance in the evolution of the genus Micrasterias (Desmidiales, Streptophyta)