20 research outputs found
Biological soil crusts across disturbance–recovery scenarios: effect of grazing regime on community dynamics
Appendix A. SIMPER analysis for BSC composition comparing disturbance and recovery sites.
SIMPER analysis for BSC composition comparing disturbance and recovery sites
Biocrusts, Environmental Factors and Functional Diversity in Drylands: looking for global patterns
Moderate disturbance increases the PLFA diversity and biomass of the microbial community in biocrusts in the Loess Plateau region of China
What drives phenotypic divergence in Leymus chinensis (Poaceae) on large-scale gradient, climate or genetic differentiation?
Elucidating the driving factors among-population divergence is an important task in evolutionary biology, however the relative contribution from natural selection and neutral genetic differentiation has been less debated. A manipulation experiment was conducted to examine whether the phenotypic divergence of Leymus chinensis depended on climate variations or genetic differentiations at 18 wild sites along a longitudinal gradient from 114 to 124°E in northeast China and at common garden condition of transplantation. Demographical, morphological and physiological phenotypes of 18 L. chinensis populations exhibited significant divergence along the gradient, but these divergent variations narrowed significantly at the transplantation. Moreover, most of the phenotypes were significantly correlated with mean annual precipitation and temperature in wild sites, suggesting that climatic variables played vital roles in phenotypic divergence of the species. Relative greater heterozygosity (H(E)), genotype evenness (E) and Shannon-Wiener diversity (I) in western group of populations suggested that genetic differentiation also drove phenotypic divergence of the species. However, neutral genetic differentiation (F(ST) = 0.041) was greatly lower than quantitative differentiation (Q(ST) = 0.199), indicating that divergent selection/climate variable was the main factor in determining the phenotypic divergence of the species along the large-scale gradient