BUSCADOR RECOLECTA

Euphorbia nicaeensis AFLP data matrix AFLP genotypes for E. nicaeensis individuals in 40 plots. "Open" refers to plots of non-facilitated individuals, while "Facilit" refers to plots of individuals growing under Juniperus sabina shrubs. Rows correspond to individual plants, while columns are the 112 loci genotyped. This is a tab-delimited text file. Euphorbia.nicaeensis.AFLP.data.txt, Plant facilitation is a positive interaction where a nurse or nurse plant community alters the local conditions, improving the life-time fitness of other beneficiary plants. In stressful environments, a common consequence is the formation of discrete vegetation patches under nurse plants, surrounded by open space. The consequences of such spatial patterns have been studied mostly at the community level. At the population level, facilitation causes a distribution of beneficiary individuals that could have intra-specific genetic consequences. The spatial patchiness and the increase in local aggregation can potentially affect the population fine-scale genetic structure. In addition, marked microenvironmental differences under nurses versus outside could lead to plastic phenotypic variation between facilitated and non-facilitated individuals, as for example reproductive asynchrony, potentially producing assortative mating. This study tests the hypothesis that plant facilitation can have genetic consequences for the population of a beneficiary plant (Euphorbia nicaeensis) by affecting its spatial genetic structure and mating patterns between subpopulations of facilitated and non-facilitated individuals. Facilitation in this system creates an aggregated distribution of beneficiary individuals compared to a minority of non-facilitated individuals that grow on the open ground. Facilitation also leads to slight phenological differences mediated by strong microenvironmental differences created by nurses compared to the open ground. Yet a molecular analysis showed that, although there is fine scale spatial genetic structure in this system, there is no evidence that it is caused by facilitation. Numerical simulations further showed that spatial genetic patterns in the population are little influenced by the phenological mismatch observed in the field. Synthesis. Facilitation leads to the strong spatial aggregation of beneficiary plants and desynchronizes their flowering phenology, but the magnitude of these effects is not enough to have local genetic consequences in our study system. Facilitation seems thus to have a homogenizing role by allowing the persistence of a diverse gene pool in populations in harsh environments, rather than fomenting genetic differentiation. Further information on other systems where facilitation produces stronger spatial or phenological effects on facilitated plants is needed to fill the large knowledge gap we have on the genetic effects of facilitation., Peer reviewed

Pinus phenotypic data and locality descriptions Phenotypes (serotiny and tree diameter) and locality descriptors (stand, coordinates, etc) for 367 Pinus halpensis and 194 Pinus pinster individuals from SE Spain. Please note: these data are a subset of the dataset originally collected by Hernández-Serrano et al. (2013) Fire structures pine serotiny at different scales. American Journal of Botany 100, 2349-2356. Pinus_phenotypes_and_localities.txt Gmatrix_P.halepensis Tab-delimited text file with symetrical matrix showing pairwise relatedness estimates for 367 individuals of Pinus halepensis. Diagonal estimates are included. Estimates are based on 251 SNPs and were estimated with the synbreed package in R. Gmatrix P.pinaster Tab-delimited text file with symetrical matrix showing pairwise relatedness estimates for 194 individuals of Pinus pinaster. Diagonal estimates are included. Estimates are based on 251 SNPs and were estimated with the synbreed package in R. Gmatrix_P.pinaster.txt, The strong association observed between fire regimes and variation in plant adaptations to fire suggests a rapid response to fire as an agent of selection. It also suggests that fire-related traits are heritable, a precondition for evolutionary change. One example is serotiny, the accumulation of seeds in unopened fruits or cones until the next fire, an important strategy for plant population persistence in fire-prone ecosystems. Here, we evaluate the potential of this trait to respond to natural selection in its natural setting. For this, we use a SNP marker approach to estimate genetic variance and heritability of serotiny directly in the field for two Mediterranean pine species. Study populations were large and heterogeneous in climatic conditions and fire regime. We first estimated the realized relatedness among trees from genotypes, and then partitioned the phenotypic variance in serotiny using Bayesian animal models that incorporated environmental predictors. As expected, field heritability was smaller (around 0.10 for both species) than previous estimates under common garden conditions (0.20). An estimate on a subset of stands with more homogeneous environmental conditions was not different from that in the complete set of stands, suggesting that our models correctly captured the environmental variation at the spatial scale of the study. Our results highlight the importance of measuring quantitative genetic parameters in natural populations, where environmental heterogeneity is a critical aspect. The heritability of serotiny, although not high, combined with high phenotypic variance within populations, confirms the potential of this fire-related trait for evolutionary change in the wild., Peer reviewed