Fewer chromosomes, more co-occurring species within plant lineages: A likely effect of local survival and colonization.

Premise: Plant lineages differ markedly in species richness globally, regionally, and locally. Differences in whole-genome characteristics (WGCs) such as monoploid chromosome number, genome size, and ploidy level may explain differences in global species richness through speciation or global extinction. However, it is unknown whether WGCs drive species richness within lineages also in a recent, postglacial regional flora or in local plant communities through local extinction or colonization and regional species turnover.

Disturbed habitats locally reduce the signal of deep evolutionary history in functional traits of plants.

The functioning of present ecosystems reflects deep evolutionary history of locally cooccurring species if their functional traits show high phylogenetic signal (PS). However, we do not understand what drives local PS. We hypothesize that local PS is high in undisturbed and stressful habitats, either due to ongoing local assembly of species that maintained ancestral traits, or to past evolutionary maintenance of ancestral traits within habitat species-pools, or to both.

Anthropogenic threats to evolutionary heritage of angiosperms in the Netherlands through an increase in high-competition environments.

Present biodiversity comprises the evolutionary heritage of Earth's epochs. Lineages from particular epochs are often found in particular habitats, but whether current habitat decline threatens the heritage from particular epochs is unknown. We hypothesized that within a given region, humans threaten specifically habitats that harbor lineages from a particular geological epoch.

Significance of Photosynthetic Characters in the Evolution of Asian (Gnetales).

is a genus in the Gnetales that has a unique but ambiguous placement within seed plant phylogeny. Previous studies have shown that has lower values of photosynthetic characters than those of other seed plants, but few species have been studied, and those that have been studied are restricted to narrow taxonomic and geographic ranges. In addition, the mechanism underlying the lower values of photosynthetic characters in remains poorly understood.