Unique drought resistance strategies occur among monkeyflower populations spanning an aridity gradient.

Premise: Annual plants often exhibit drought-escape and avoidance strategies to cope with limited water availability. Determining the extent of variation and factors underlying the evolution of divergent strategies is necessary for determining population responses to more frequent and severe droughts.

Methods: We leveraged five Mimulus guttatus populations collected across an aridity gradient within manipulative drought and quantitative genetics experiments to examine constitutive and terminal-drought induced responses in drought resistance traits.