Little plant, big city: a test of adaptation to urban environments in common ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia).

ABSTRACT: A full understanding of how cities shape adaptation requires characterizing genetically-based phenotypic and fitness differences between urban and rural populations under field conditions. We used a reciprocal transplant experiment with the native plant common ragweed, (Ambrosia artemisiifolia), and found that urban and rural populations have diverged in flowering time, a trait that strongly affects fitness. Although urban populations flowered earlier than rural populations, plants growing in urban field sites flowered later than plants in rural field sites. This counter-gradient variation is consistent adaptive divergence between urban and rural populations. Also consistent with local adaptation, both urban and rural genotypes experienced stronger net selection in the foreign than

SUBMITTER: Gorton AJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6030533 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature