| Abstract Detail
Biogeography Liu, Qing [1]. Climatic-niche structure of grasses (Poaceae) in China's nature reserves. Explaining climate-niche structure for grasses over broad geographic scales is a central issue of biogeography and macroecology. We document climate-niche structure for grasses in China's nature reserves and discuss their formation mechanisms using grass richness data combined with climatic, physiological and phylogenetic data. Our results suggest that climatic-niche structure of grasses is phylogenetically conservative for BEP and PACCMAD clades along temperature gradients and phylogenetically conservative for Chloridoideae and Panicoideae along precipitation gradients. At the national scale, the divergence patterns of climatic-niches between two major clades were more distinguishable than the difference between C3 and C4 grasses. High rates of climatic-niche evolution of C4 grasses is shown in the nodes of the subtropical forest region. There appears to be a strong association between elevation gradients and grass diversity where specific environmental condition (e.g. energy) and rapid shifts among climatic regimes drive high grass diversity. Evolutionary conservatism of climatic-niches may be influenced by species interactions within nodes of each C4 variant besides physiological tolerances. These results have important implications for explaining continental (eastern Asia) scale of grass richness patterns, and imply that adaptations to major climate changes readily will be accomplished in C4 grass nodes of high rates climatic-niche evolution in China's nature reserves. Broader Impacts:
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1 - South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy Of Sciences, Herbarium, So China Botanical Garden, Xingke Road 723#, Tianhe District,, Guangzhou, N/A, 510650, China
Keywords:
Poaceae
photosynthesis
Ecological niche modeling
molecular phylogeny.
Presentation Type: Poster:Posters for Topics
Session: P
Location: Khorassan Ballroom/Chase Park Plaza
Date: Monday, July 11th, 2011
Time: 5:30 PM
Number: PBG007
Abstract ID:176 |
