Abstract
Tropical forests, a key-category of land ecosystems, are faced with the world’s highest levels of habitat conversion and associated biodiversity loss. In tropical Asia, Dipterocarpaceae are one of the economically and ecologically most important tree families, but their genomic diversity and evolution remain understudied, hampered by a lack of available genetic resources. Southern China represents the northern limit for Dipterocarpaceae, and thus changes in habitat ecology, community composition and adaptability to climatic conditions are of particular interest in this group. Phylogenomics is a tool for exploring both biodiversity and evolutionary relationships through space and time using plastome, nuclear and mitochondrial genome. We generated full plastome and Nuclear Ribosomal Cistron (NRC) data for Chinese Dipterocarpaceae species as a first step to improve our understanding of their ecology and evolutionary relationships. We generated the plastome of Dipterocarpus turbinatus, the species with the widest distribution using it as a baseline for comparisons with other taxa. Results showed low level of genomic diversity among analysed range-edge species, and different evolutionary history of the incongruent NRC and plastome data. Genomic resources provided in this study will serve as a starting point for future studies on conservation and sustainable use of these dominant forest taxa, phylogenomics and evolutionary studies.
Highlights
Forests hold more than 75 percent of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity and provide products and services for socioeconomic development of millions of people[1]
We aim to provide the first assessment of the genomic diversity in Dipterocarpaceae species found at the tropics-subtropics boundary by (1) comparing genomic diversity of species found at the northern margin of the Dipterocarpaceae distribution range, namely the Southern Chinese provinces; (2) analyzing how the nucleotide variability is distributed in the plastome and the Nuclear Ribosomal Cistron (NRC); (3) comparing both the intrageneric and intergeneric nucleotide diversity, as China has high generic but relatively poor species diversity (Fig. 1)
We reconstructed plastomes and NRC sequences for nine Dipterocarpaceae species occurring in China and two additional species of Dipterocarpaceae
Summary
Forests hold more than 75 percent of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity and provide products and services for socioeconomic development of millions of people[1]. Deforestation (in addition to the burning of fossil fuel) is a large contributor to the increase of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to the highest level of the last 20 Myr[7] During this century, expected widening of the tropical climatic belt could promote distribution shifts in tropical plant communities (towards higher latitude and elevation), altering patterns of local/regional endemism and increasing rates of extinction (e.g. temperate taxa on tropical mountains)[8,9]. Studies on the effects of selective logging (with removal of approximately one third of all trees) on vegetation in Kalimantan showed that harvesting removed 62% of dipterocarp basal area[17] This high proportion stresses the significant physiognomic and ecological role of Dipterocarpaceae and understanding both evolution and the distribution of genomic diversity in this family. Southern China represents a large “colonization front” for tropical tree species, and studies of species found in this area are interesting for monitoring habitat ecology, community composition and adaptation to changing climatic conditions
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