Populations of western North American monkeyflowers accrue niche breadth primarily via genotypic divergence in environmental optima.

ABSTRACT: Niche breadth, the range of environments that individuals, populations, and species can tolerate, is a fundamental ecological and evolutionary property, yet few studies have examined how niche breadth is partitioned across biological scales. We use a published dataset of thermal performance for a single population from each of 10 closely related species of western North American monkeyflowers (genus Mimulus) to investigate whether populations achieve broad thermal niches through general purpose genotypes, specialized genotypes with divergent environmental optima, and/or variation among genotypes in the degree of generalization. We found the strongest relative support for the hypothesis that populations with greater genetic variation for thermal optimum had broader thermal niches, an

SUBMITTER: Coughlin AO 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9587463 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature