Document Type

Article

Abstract

Climate change has caused increasing temperatures and drier climates over the past decade. This has especially affected the western coast of North America, bringing even drier and hotter climates. This makes it difficult for plant life to prosper in these areas. One way that plants fight these drought conditions is through drought resistance traits. These drought resistance traits include flowering early and reproducing early before drought conditions onset or increasing the efficiency of water use by tissues and the stomata of the plant. While these traits are both beneficial in fighting drought conditions, they often negatively impact each other. This negative tradeoff is generally found due to genetics that control the physiology of the stomata. These genes can be affected by environmental conditions or genetic correlations. In this thesis, we use Mimulus guttatus to determine how heritability, genetic correlations, and environmental conditions affect the expression drought escape and drought avoidance traits. We discovered that there is variation in the expression of these traits between Oregon and California populations. We also find significant variation in the heritability, genetic correlation, and plasticity of morphological traits. These results together suggest that local adaptation is occurring at specific environmental sites. These results can help us predict how Mimulus guttatus, and possibly other plant species, will adapt to the drier and hotter temperatures brought about by climate change.

Publication Date

2022

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