Abstract
Evolutionary histories of plants from the mid-elevation (montane) zone of European mountain ranges have only rarely been documented, standing in contrast to those of well-researched inhabitants of (sub-)alpine and foothill zones. To fill this gap, we have reconstructed the phylogeography of Arabidopsis halleri, a species preferring coniferous woodlands and corresponding secondary habitats in the montane zone of the Alps, Carpathians, Hercynian massif and Dinaric Alps. Based on range-wide sampling and finer-scale analyses of multiple multilocus DNA markers, we have addressed phylogeographic patterns among the Carpathian populations and inferred their relationships to A. halleri from neighbouring mountain ranges. We also present a taxonomic re-evaluation of the species in Europe, based on the revealed genetic structure complemented by morphological data. Besides two distinct Alpine groups, we identified a major phylogeographic split between the Western and South-Eastern Carpathians. Interestingly, Western and South-Eastern Carpathian populations were genetically closer to populations from neighbouring mountain ranges (the Hercynian massif and the Dinaric Alps for the Western and South-Eastern Carpathians, respectively) than they were to each other, likely reflecting long-term isolation in different parts of the Carpathians or different (re)colonization pathways during the Holocene. In spite of the considerable environmentally correlated variation, the five major European genetic groups exhibited distinctive morphological characters, and we therefore propose treating them as separate subspecies: A. halleri subsp. halleri (Western Europe, Hercynian massif), A. halleri subsp. tatrica (Western Carpathians), A. halleri subsp. ovirensis (Eastern Alps), A. halleri subsp. occidentalis (Western Alps) and A. halleri subsp. dacica (Eastern and Southern Carpathians and Dinaric Alps).
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27 November 2019
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27 May 2020
Correction to: Plant Systematics and Evolution
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to all colleagues that helped us with the field sampling (see the Appendix) or provided locality data. The research was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (Grant No. 16-10809S) and by the Grant Agency VEGA, Bratislava, Slovakia (Grant No. 2/0137/17). The STRUCTURE computations were performed using resources provided by the Slovak Infrastructure for High Performance Computing (SIVVP, www.sivvp.sk).
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Online resource 1. Details on the 88 populations of Arabidopsis halleri sampled for the present study.
Online resource 2. Summary of results of STRUCTURE analyses based on AFLP data on Arabidopsis halleri.
Online resource 3. Morphometric characters scored in morphologically screened populations of Arabidopsis halleri.
Online resource 4. Summary of 19 quantitative characters and five ratios scored in the morphological dataset of five Arabidopsis halleri lineages.
Online resource 5. Canonical discriminant analysis based on morphological characters and individual plants of pairs of genetic lineages/subspecies of Arabidopsis halleri, correlations of morphological characters with canonical axis (total correlation structure).
Online resource 6. Matrix of AFLP fragments used in analyses of Arabidopsis halleri.
Online resource 7. Matrix of microsatellite alleles used in analyses of Arabidopsis halleri.
Online resource 8. Matrix of morphometric measurements used in analyses of Arabidopsis halleri.
Online resource 9. Discriminant functions enabling the determination of infraspecific taxa with morphological descriptions.
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Šrámková, G., Kolář, F., Záveská, E. et al. Phylogeography and taxonomic reassessment of Arabidopsis halleri – a montane species from Central Europe. Plant Syst Evol 305, 885–898 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00606-019-01625-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00606-019-01625-y