Assessing the influence of life form and life cycle on the response of desert plants to past climate change: Genetic diversity patterns of an herbaceous lineage of Nolana along western South America.

Premise Of The Study: Plant responses to past climate change could have been shaped by life-history traits. Here we explore the influence of life form on the response of xerophytic plants to Quaternary climate fluctuations, through a comparison of genetic patterns of codistributed herbaceous and shrubby lineages of the genus Nolana.

Methods: We reconstructed the phylogeographic history of a herbaceous lineage of three species of Nolana distributed from a northern arid zone (30°S) to a southern wet-temperate (42°S) zone, by sequencing two cpDNA regions.