Abstract
The earth is experiencing major changes in global and regional climates and changes are predicted to accelerate in the future. Many species will be under considerable pressure to evolve, to migrate, or be faced with extinction. Clonal plants would appear to be at a particular disadvantage due to their limited mobility and limited capacity for adaptation. However, they have outlived previous environmental shifts and clonal species have persisted for millenia. Clonal spread offers unique ecological advantages, such as resource sharing, risk sharing, and economies of scale among ramets within genotypes. We suggest that ecological attributes of clonal plants, in tandem with variation in gene regulation through epigenetic mechanisms that facilitate and optimize phenotype variation in response to environmental change may permit them to be well suited to projected conditions.
Highlights
Rapid and extreme climate changes are predicted, raising questions as to the capacity of plants to adjust to and survive the new environments
Recent work in epigenetics has revealed an alternative path to adaptation involving variation in gene regulation, whereby genotypes can respond to environmental change without genetic recombination (Richards, 2006; Jablonka and Raz, 2009; Massicotte and Angers, 2012), that has consequences for clonal plants (Verhoeven and Preite, 2014; Douhovnikoff and Dodd, 2015)
We suggest that ecological advantages to the clonal growth strategy, in tandem with epigenetically regulated accommodation through plasticity could position many clonal plant species well for future ecological success
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Agroecology and Land Use Systems, a section of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. Clonal plants would appear to be at a particular disadvantage due to their limited mobility and limited capacity for adaptation. They have outlived previous environmental shifts and clonal species have persisted for millenia. Clonal spread offers unique ecological advantages, such as resource sharing, risk sharing, and economies of scale among ramets within genotypes. We suggest that ecological attributes of clonal plants, in tandem with variation in gene regulation through epigenetic mechanisms that facilitate and optimize phenotype variation in response to environmental change may permit them to be well suited to projected conditions
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