Assessing adaptive and plastic responses in growth and functional traits in a 10-year-old common garden experiment with pedunculate oak (Quercus robur L.) suggests that directional selection can drive climatic adaptation.

ABSTRACT: Understanding how tree species will respond to a future climate requires reliable and quantitative estimates of intra-specific variation under current climate conditions. We studied three 10-year-old common garden experiments established across a rainfall and drought gradient planted with nearly 10,000 pedunculate oak (Quercus robur L.) trees from ten provenances with known family structure. We aimed at disentangling adaptive and plastic responses for growth (height and diameter at breast height) as well as for leaf and wood functional traits related to adaptation to dry environments. We used restricted maximum likelihood approaches to assess additive genetic variation expressed as narrow-sense heritability (h²), quantitative trait differentiation among provenances (Q

SUBMITTER: George JP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7513705 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature