Dissemin is shutting down on January 1st, 2025

Published in

The Royal Society, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 1839(376), 2021

DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0372

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Macroevolutionary consequences of mast seeding

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Red circle
Published version: archiving forbidden
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Masting characterizes large, intermittent and highly synchronous seeding events among individual plants and is found throughout the plant Tree of Life (ToL). Although masting can increase plant fitness, little is known about whether it results in evolutionary changes across entire clades, such as by promoting speciation or enhanced trait selection. Here, we tested if masting has macroevolutionary consequences by combining the largest existing dataset of population-level reproductive time series and time-calibrated phylogenetic tree of vascular plants. We found that the coefficient of variation (CV p ) of reproductive output for 307 species covaried with evolutionary history, and more so within clades than expected by random. Speciation rates estimated at the species level were highest at intermediate values of CV p and regional-scale synchrony (S r ) in seed production, that is, there were unimodal correlations. There was no support for monotonic correlations between either CV p or S r and rates of speciation or seed size evolution. These results were robust to different sampling decisions, and we found little bias in our dataset compared with the wider plant ToL. While masting is often adaptive and encompasses a rich diversity of reproductive behaviours, we suggest it may have few consequences beyond the species level. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The ecology and evolution of synchronized seed production in plants’.