Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research, Dunedin, New Zealand.
Ecosystems and Global Change Group, Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EA, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2021 Dec 6;376(1839):20200372. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0372. Epub 2021 Oct 18.
Masting characterizes large, intermittent and highly synchronous seeding events among individual plants and is found throughout the plant Tree of Life (ToL). Although masting can increase plant fitness, little is known about whether it results in evolutionary changes across entire clades, such as by promoting speciation or enhanced trait selection. Here, we tested if masting has macroevolutionary consequences by combining the largest existing dataset of population-level reproductive time series and time-calibrated phylogenetic tree of vascular plants. We found that the coefficient of variation (CV) of reproductive output for 307 species covaried with evolutionary history, and more so within clades than expected by random. Speciation rates estimated at the species level were highest at intermediate values of CV and regional-scale synchrony (S) in seed production, that is, there were unimodal correlations. There was no support for monotonic correlations between either CV or S and rates of speciation or seed size evolution. These results were robust to different sampling decisions, and we found little bias in our dataset compared with the wider plant ToL. While masting is often adaptive and encompasses a rich diversity of reproductive behaviours, we suggest it may have few consequences beyond the species level. This article is part of the theme issue 'The ecology and evolution of synchronized seed production in plants'.
结实特征是指个体植物之间大型、间歇性和高度同步的结实事件，存在于整个植物生命之树（ToL）中。尽管结实可以提高植物的适合度，但人们对它是否会导致整个进化枝的进化变化知之甚少，例如是否会促进物种形成或增强特征选择。在这里，我们通过结合最大的现有种群水平生殖时间序列数据集和已校准时间的维管植物系统发育树，测试了结实是否具有宏观进化后果。我们发现，307 个物种的生殖输出的变异系数（CV）与进化历史有关，在进化枝内的相关性比随机预期的更显著。在种子生产的 CV 和区域规模同步（S）的中间值处，物种水平上估计的物种形成率最高，即存在单峰相关性。CV 或 S 与物种形成率或种子大小进化之间没有单调相关关系的支持。这些结果对于不同的采样决策是稳健的，与更广泛的植物 ToL 相比，我们的数据集几乎没有偏差。尽管结实通常是适应性的，并包含丰富多样的生殖行为，但我们认为它在物种水平之外可能没有什么后果。本文是主题为“植物中同步种子生产的生态学和进化”的一部分。
