Environment of habitat types controls evolutionary heritage of plants these habitat types contain

What is it about?

We hypothesize that: (1) there are ‘museums’ and ‘cradles’ within regions – some species pools of particular habitat types contain angiosperm (flowering plants) lineages from ancient geological epochs, others from recent epochs; (2) habitat-specific abiotic factors control the number of angiosperm lineages from a given epoch contained in a given habitat species pool. We found that species pools of most habitat types were characterized by over- or underrepresentation of lineages from at least one epoch, dating back to the origin of angiosperms. These patterns are not captured by mean lineage ages. Abiotic environments explained on average 56% and up to 75% of the variance in the number of lineages per epoch, but with opposing effects of the same factor for different epochs. Specifically, warm and dry habitats tend to contain lineages dating back to warm and dry epochs. Identifying lineages from sets of random time intervals rather than from a set of geological epochs significantly reduced relationships with the environment. We conclude that within a region, habitat types differ significantly in the evolutionary heritage they contain from different geological epochs, and these differences are controlled by the environment.

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Why is it important?

Biodiversity has been declining in last decades at a dangerous rate. We need to understand, where this decline can be most damaging for evolutionary potential of biota. We suggest that humans should preserve evolutionary heritage not only in hot-spots of biodiversity, but also in particular habitat types from not especially diverse regions, which contain plant communities with imprints of high rates of diversification from particular geologic epochs. These communities can maintain unique sets of adaptations to specific environments.

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