Acaulescence promotes speciation and shapes the distribution patterns of palms in Neotropical seasonally dry habitats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rainforests have been a source of lineages to open and seasonally dry habitats throughout Angiosperm evolution, especially in the Neotropics. However, the underlying mechanisms that allow such shifts remain poorly understood at large spatial scales. Here, we test whether acaulescence (an underground stem or a very short stem concealed in the ground) has affected the colonization and speciation in Neotropical seasonally dry habitats by cocosoid palms (Cocoseae). Acaulescent species maintain their growth underground, which increases their chances of survival from prolonged seasonal dry season and frequent fires. We use an integrative approach based on trait‐dependent diversification models, phylogenetic comparative methods and ecological niche models. We found that shifts towards acaulescent growth form were accompanied by evolutionary transitions to seasonally dry habitats. Acaulescent lineages had higher speciation rates than non‐acaulescent ones. However, the interaction between acaulescence and seasonally dry habitats had no significant effect on Cocoseae speciation rates. Acaulescent palms are primarily distributed in Neotropical seasonally dry habitats and non‐acaulescent palms are concentrated in Amazonian rainforests. Our results suggest that an underground stem, with high carbohydrate and water storage capacity, is a preadaptation by which rainforest lineages were able to colonize and diversify in new fire‐prone, increasingly seasonal and drier adaptive zones. The projected global expansion of dry seasonal habitats requires an understanding of how drought‐avoidance functional traits evolve and how they are linked to seasonally dry habitats. Our results are, thus, a step forward in determining plant response mechanisms to drier and seasonal conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".