March-Salas Martí, Fitze Patrick S
Department of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN-CSIC), Madrid, Spain.
Department of Biodiversity and Ecologic Restoration, Instituto Pirenaico de Ecología (IPE-CSIC), Jaca, Spain.
PeerJ. 2019 Mar 8;7:e6443. doi: 10.7717/peerj.6443. eCollection 2019.
Climate change is a key factor that may cause the extinction of species. The associated reduced weather predictability may alter the survival of plants, especially during their early life stages, when individuals are most fragile. While it is expected that extreme weather events will be highly detrimental for species, the effects of more subtle environmental changes have been little considered. In a four-year experiment on two herbaceous plants, and , we manipulated the predictability of precipitation by changing the temporal correlation of precipitation events while maintaining average precipitation constant, leading to more and less predictable treatments. We assessed the effect of predictability on plant viability in terms of seedling emergence, survival, seed production, and population growth rate. We found greater seedling emergence, survival, and population growth for plants experiencing lower intra-seasonal predictability, but more so during early compared to late life stages. Since predictability levels were maintained across four generations, we have also tested whether descendants exhibited transgenerational responses to previous predictability conditions. In , descendants had increased the seedling emergence compared to ancestors under both treatments, but more so under lower precipitation predictability. However, higher predictability in the late treatment induced higher survival in descendants, showing that these conditions may benefit long-term survival. This experiment highlights the ability of some plants to rapidly exploit environmental resources and increase their survival under less predictable conditions, especially during early life stages. Therefore, this study provides relevant evidence of the survival capacity of some species under current and future short-term environmental alterations.
气候变化是可能导致物种灭绝的关键因素。相关的天气可预测性降低可能会改变植物的生存状况，尤其是在其早期生命阶段，此时个体最为脆弱。虽然预计极端天气事件对物种极为不利，但更为微妙的环境变化的影响却很少被考虑。在对两种草本植物进行的为期四年的实验中，我们通过改变降水事件的时间相关性来控制降水的可预测性，同时保持平均降水量不变，从而产生了可预测性较高和较低的处理组。我们从幼苗出土、存活、种子产量和种群增长率方面评估了可预测性对植物生存能力的影响。我们发现，季节内可预测性较低的植物，其幼苗出土、存活和种群增长情况更好，不过在生命早期比晚期更为明显。由于在四代中都维持了可预测性水平，我们还测试了后代是否对先前的可预测性条件表现出跨代反应。在[具体植物名称]中，与祖先相比，两种处理下的后代幼苗出土率都有所增加，但在降水可预测性较低的处理下增加得更多。然而，后期处理中较高的可预测性使后代的存活率更高，这表明这些条件可能有利于长期生存。该实验突出了一些植物在较不可预测的条件下，尤其是在早期生命阶段，迅速利用环境资源并提高其生存能力的能力。因此，本研究为一些物种在当前和未来短期环境变化下的生存能力提供了相关证据。
