Historical comparisons show evolutionary changes in drought responses in European plant species after two decades of climate change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Plants must continuously respond to environmental changes, and a timely question is whether and how populations respond to ongoing global warming and increased drought frequencies and intensities. Plants can either respond through migration or through phenotypic plasticity or their populations can adapt evolutionarily, which encompasses the evolution of trait means and of trait plasticity. One way to detect such evolutionary changes within plant populations is through historical comparisons where plants grown from seeds collected in the past (“ancestors”) are compared to freshly collected seeds from the same populations (“descendants”) in common garden experiments. We used 21- to 26-year-old seeds stored in seed banks for two multi-species experiments that investigated changes in phenotypic traits and their plasticity conferring drought tolerance in early life stages of European plant species. In the first experiment, we used seedlings of four Mediterranean species, ceased watering and recorded their day of mortality. In the second experiment, we studied phenotypic responses to drought in juvenile plants of nine species originating from temperate regions in Europe. In one of four species in the first experiment, descendants survived significantly longer without watering and were smaller than their ancestors. In the second experiment, descendant plants were generally taller under well-watered conditions but smaller under drought than their ancestors, thus showing stronger plasticity. Our historical comparisons suggest that some populations have likely evolved through changes in trait means and plasticity in ways consistent with adaptation to increased drought. Using seed bank material for historical comparisons has several weaknesses, such as unknown sampling protocols or invisible fractions. However, we show how accurately sampled and stored seed bank collections can be used similar to the resurrection approach for investigating rapid evolutionary processes in early life stages of plants under climate change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".