scholarly journals Effects of Climate, Plant Height, and Evolutionary Age on Geographical Patterns of Fruit Type

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tong Lyu ◽  
Yunyun Wang ◽  
Ao Luo ◽  
Yaoqi Li ◽  
Shijia Peng ◽  
...  

Fruit type is a key reproductive trait associated with plant evolution and adaptation. However, large-scale geographical patterns in fruit type composition and the mechanisms driving these patterns remain to be established. Contemporary environment, plant functional traits and evolutionary age may all influence fruit type composition, while their relative importance remains unclear. Here, using data on fruit types, plant height and distributions of 28,222 (∼ 90.1%) angiosperm species in China, we analyzed the geographical patterns in the proportion of fleshy-fruited species for all angiosperms, trees, shrubs, and herbaceous species separately, and compared the relative effects of contemporary climate, ecosystem primary productivity, plant height, and evolutionary age on these patterns. We found that the proportion of fleshy-fruited species per grid cell for all species and different growth forms all showed significant latitudinal patterns, being the highest in southeastern China. Mean plant height per grid cell and actual evapotranspiration (AET) representing ecosystem primary productivity were the strongest drivers of geographical variations in the proportion of fleshy-fruited species, but their relative importance varied between growth forms. From herbaceous species to shrubs and trees, the relative effects of mean plant height decreased. Mean genus age had significant yet consistently weaker effects on proportion of fleshy-fruited species than mean plant height and AET, and environmental temperature and precipitation contributed to those of only trees and shrubs. These results suggest that biotic and environmental factors and evolutionary age of floras jointly shape the pattern in proportion of fleshy-fruited species, and improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying geographical variations in fruit type composition. Our study also demonstrates the need of integrating multiple biotic and abiotic factors to fully understand the drivers of large-scale patterns of plant reproductive traits.

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 791-803 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiheng Wang ◽  
Yaoqi Li ◽  
Xiangyan Su ◽  
Shengli Tao ◽  
Xiao Feng ◽  
...  

Abstract Aims Plant height is a key functional trait related to aboveground biomass, leaf photosynthesis and plant fitness. However, large-scale geographical patterns in community-average plant height (CAPH) of woody species and drivers of these patterns across different life forms remain hotly debated. Moreover, whether CAPH could be used as a predictor of ecosystem primary productivity is unknown. Methods We compiled mature height and distributions of 11 422 woody species in eastern Eurasia, and estimated geographic patterns in CAPH for different taxonomic groups and life forms. Then we evaluated the effects of environmental (including current climate and historical climate change since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM)) and evolutionary factors on CAPH. Lastly, we compared the predictive power of CAPH on primary productivity with that of LiDAR-derived canopy-height data from a global survey. Important Findings Geographic patterns of CAPH and their drivers differed among taxonomic groups and life forms. The strongest predictor for CAPH of all woody species combined, angiosperms, all dicots and deciduous dicots was actual evapotranspiration, while temperature was the strongest predictor for CAPH of monocots and tree, shrub and evergreen dicots, and water availability for gymnosperms. Historical climate change since the LGM had only weak effects on CAPH. No phylogenetic signal was detected in family-wise average height, which was also unrelated to the tested environmental factors. Finally, we found a strong correlation between CAPH and ecosystem primary productivity. Primary productivity showed a weaker relationship with CAPH of the tallest species within a grid cell and no relationship with LiDAR-derived canopy height reported in the global survey. Our findings suggest that current climate rather than historical climate change and evolutionary history determine the geographical patterns in CAPH. However, the relative effects of climatic factors representing environmental energy and water availability on spatial variations of CAPH vary among plant life forms. Moreover, our results also suggest that CAPH can be used as a good predictor of ecosystem primary productivity.


1980 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L. Hamblin ◽  
Brian L. Pitcher

Several lines of archaeological evidence are presented in this paper to suggest the existence of class warfare among the Classic Maya and of issues that historically have been associated with class conflict. This evidence indicates that class warfare may have halted the rule of the monument-producing, or Classic, elites and precipitated the depopulation of the lowland area. The theory is evaluated quantitatively by testing for time-related mathematical patterns that have been found to characterize large-scale conflicts in historical societies. The information used in the evaluation involves the time series data on the duration of rule by Classic elites as inferred from the production of monuments with Long Count dates at a sample of 82 ceremonial centers. The analyses confirm that the Maya data do exhibit the temporal and geographical patterns predicted from the class conflict explanation of the Classic Maya collapse. Alternative predictions from the other theories are considered but generally not found to be supported by these data.


Paleobiology ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 335-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geerat J. Vermeij

Geographical restriction to refuges implies the regional extinction of taxa in areas of the previous range falling outside the refuge. A comparison of the circumstances in the refuge with those in areas from which the taxa were eliminated is potentially informative for pinpointing the causes of extinction. A synthesis of data on the geographical and stratigraphical distributions of cool-water molluscs of the North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans during the late Neogene reveals four patterns of geographical restriction, at least two of which imply that climatic cooling was not the only cause of extinction during the last several million years. These four patterns are (1) the northwestern Pacific restriction, involving 15 taxa whose amphi-Pacific distributions during the late Neogene became subsequently restricted to the Asian side of the Pacific; (2) the northwestern Atlantic restriction, involving six taxa whose early Pleistocene distribution is inferred to have been amphi-Atlantic, but whose present-day and late Pleistocene ranges are confined to the northwestern Atlantic; (3) a vicariant Pacific pattern, in which many ancestral amphi-Pacific taxa gave rise to separate eastern and western descendants; and (4) the circumboreal restriction, involving six taxa whose early Pleistocene distribution, encompassing both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, became subsequently limited to the North Pacific. Like the Pliocene extinctions in the Atlantic, previously studied by Stanley and others, the vicariant Pacific pattern is most reasonably interpreted as having resulted from regional extinction of northern populations in response to cooling. The northwestern Pacific and Atlantic restrictions, however, cannot be accounted for in this way. In contrast to the northeastern margins of the Pacific and Atlantic, the northwestern margins are today characterized by wide temperature fluctuations and by extensive development of shore ice in winter. Northeastern, rather than northwestern, restriction would be expected if cooling were the overriding cause of regional extinction. Among the other possible causes of extinction, only a decrease in primary productivity can account for the observed northwestern and circumboreal patterns of restriction. Geographical patterns of body size and the distribution of siliceous deposits provide supporting evidence that primary productivity declined after the Miocene in the northeastern Pacific, but remained high in the northwestern Pacific, and that productivity in the Pacific is generally higher than it is in the Atlantic. The patterns of geographical restriction in the northern oceans thus provide additional support to previous inferences that reductions in primary productivity have played a significant role in marine extinctions.


2007 ◽  
Vol 27 (17) ◽  
pp. 2198-2210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Costas Dounas ◽  
Ian Davies ◽  
George Triantafyllou ◽  
Panayota Koulouri ◽  
George Petihakis ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 423
Author(s):  
Uirá do do Amaral ◽  
Luiz Leonardo Ferreira ◽  
Kelly Martins de Souza ◽  
Emerson Pereira Vieira ◽  
Michelle Nunes Barcelos

The culture of sweet passion fruit has been increasingly studied and exploited commercially in Brazil, with emphasis on the State of São Paulo. This is due to the high value achieved in the market of fresh fruit and be considered a food with functional properties beneficial to human health. However, the cultivation on a large scale finds some obstacles, as the control of weeds with the use of herbicides. In this sense, the objective of this work was to evaluate the phytotoxicity of seven herbicides with different mechanisms of action in seedlings of sweet passion fruit. Different variables were assessed: initial plant height (IPH) and final plant height (FPH); initial number of sheets (INS) and end number of sheets (ENS); intoxication of plants (INTO); fresh leaf mass (FLM) and dry leaf mass (DLM); fresh stem mass (FSM); dry steam mass (DSM); fresh root mass (FRM) and dry root mass (DRM) and total dry mass (TDM). Chlorimuron-ethyl (ALS inhibitor), glyphosate (EPSP synthase inhibitor), paraquat (photosystem I inhibitor) and atrazine (photosystem II inhibitor) have the higher effect on the variables analyzed, and they caused some kind of intoxication in the plants of sweet passion fruit. Conversely, haloxyfop-p-methyl (ACCase inhibitor) and fomesafen (protox inhibitor) showed a lesser effect on the sweet passion fruit plants.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 3745-3758 ◽  
Author(s):  
François Massonnet ◽  
Antoine Barthélemy ◽  
Koffi Worou ◽  
Thierry Fichefet ◽  
Martin Vancoppenolle ◽  
...  

Abstract. The ice thickness distribution (ITD) is one of the core constituents of modern sea ice models. The ITD accounts for the unresolved spatial variability of sea ice thickness within each model grid cell. While there is a general consensus on the added physical realism brought by the ITD, how to discretize it remains an open question. Here, we use the ocean–sea ice general circulation model, Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean (NEMO) version 3.6 and Louvain-la-Neuve sea Ice Model (LIM) version 3 (NEMO3.6-LIM3), forced by atmospheric reanalyses to test how the ITD discretization (number of ice thickness categories, positions of the category boundaries) impacts the simulated mean Arctic and Antarctic sea ice states. We find that winter ice volumes in both hemispheres increase with the number of categories and attribute that increase to a net enhancement of basal ice growth rates. The range of simulated mean winter volumes in the various experiments amounts to ∼30 % and ∼10 % of the reference values (run with five categories) in the Arctic and Antarctic, respectively. This suggests that the way the ITD is discretized has a significant influence on the model mean state, all other things being equal. We also find that the existence of a thick category with lower bounds at ∼4 and ∼2 m for the Arctic and Antarctic, respectively, is a prerequisite for allowing the storage of deformed ice and therefore for fostering thermodynamic growth in thinner categories. Our analysis finally suggests that increasing the resolution of the ITD without changing the lower limit of the upper category results in small but not negligible variations of ice volume and extent. Our study proposes for the first time a bi-polar process-based explanation of the origin of mean sea ice state changes when the ITD discretization is modified. The sensitivity experiments conducted in this study, based on one model, emphasize that the choice of category positions, especially of thickest categories, has a primary influence on the simulated mean sea ice states while the number of categories and resolution have only a secondary influence. It is also found that the current default discretization of the NEMO3.6-LIM3 model is sufficient for large-scale present-day climate applications. In all cases, the role of the ITD discretization on the simulated mean sea ice state has to be appreciated relative to other influences (parameter uncertainty, forcing uncertainty, internal climate variability).


Entropy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuqing Sun ◽  
Jun Niu

Hydrological regionalization is a useful step in hydrological modeling and prediction. The regionalization is not always straightforward, however, due to the lack of long-term hydrological data and the complex multi-scale variability features embedded in the data. This study examines the multiscale soil moisture variability for the simulated data on a grid cell base obtained from a large-scale hydrological model, and clusters the grid-cell based soil moisture data using wavelet-based multiscale entropy and principal component analysis, over the Xijiang River basin in South China, for the period of 2002–2010. The effective regionalization, for 169 grid cells with the special resolution of 0.5° × 0.5°, produced homogeneous groups based on the pattern of wavelet-based entropy information. Four distinct modes explain 80.14% of the total embedded variability of the transformed wavelet power across different timescales. Moreover, the possible implications of the regionalization results for local hydrological applications, such as parameter estimation for an ungagged catchment and designing a uniform prediction strategy for a sub-area in a large-scale basin, are discussed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (12) ◽  
pp. 6435-6448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiawei Hou ◽  
Albert I. J. M. van Dijk ◽  
Luigi J. Renzullo ◽  
Robert A. Vertessy

Abstract. River discharge measurements have proven invaluable to monitor the global water cycle, assess flood risk, and guide water resource management. However, there is a delay, and ongoing decline, in the availability of gauging data and stations are highly unevenly distributed globally. While not a substitute for river discharge measurement, remote sensing is a cost-effective technology to acquire information on river dynamics in situations where ground-based measurements are unavailable. The general approach has been to relate satellite observation to discharge measured in situ, which prevents its use for ungauged rivers. Alternatively, hydrological models are now available that can be used to estimate river discharge globally. While subject to greater errors and biases than measurements, model estimates of river discharge do expand the options for applying satellite-based discharge monitoring in ungauged rivers. Our aim was to test whether satellite gauging reaches (SGRs), similar to virtual stations in satellite altimetry, can be constructed based on Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) optical or Global Flood Detection System (GFDS) passive microwave-derived surface water extent fraction and simulated discharge from the World-Wide Water (W3) model version 2. We designed and tested two methods to develop SGRs across the Amazon Basin and found that the optimal grid cell selection method performed best for relating MODIS and GFDS water extent to simulated discharge. The number of potential river reaches to develop SGRs increases from upstream to downstream reaches as rivers widen. MODIS SGRs are feasible for more river reaches than GFDS SGRs due to its higher spatial resolution. However, where they could be constructed, GFDS SGRs predicted discharge more accurately as observations were less affected by cloud and vegetation. We conclude that SGRs are suitable for automated large-scale application and offer a possibility to predict river discharge variations from satellite observations alone, for both gauged and ungauged rivers.


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