The Role of Geochemistry in the Diversification of North American Asteraceae

How much do geochemical (and other) abiotic variables explain changes in the proliferation of daisy species across the United States?
1
Martin Goldhaber, Chase Mason, Eric Goolsby, Robert Edwards, and the USGS Powell Center Geo-Eco-Evo Working Group 1
bortedwards@gmail.com

BACKGROUND RESULTS
It is apparent that species diversity varies in space, but it can also vary through time. This
can be the result of a change in the rate at which new species arise and accumulate.
a) b)
An ancestral population developing a tolerance to a particular element in the environment
can drive an uptick in speciation as new niches open up to colonization. Similarly, a change
in the environment can allow organisms pre-adapted to the new conditions to expand into
new niches and increase diversity.

The Asteraceae represent almost 10% of the worlds flowering plants including daisies,
sunflowers, lettuce, thistles, and artichokes, but the drivers of this diversity are unclear.

14 tribes within the family are majority North-America endemic. Centers of diversity for
each tribe vary but are typically centered around the southern and south western United
States and central Mexico.

Environments in these regions are know to be highly varied, with mosaics and gradients of
geochemical, climatic and topographic conditions.
a) Phylogeny for 7 Asteraceae tribes with
Identifying whether particular environmental variables, or combinations of variables, are significant variables from diversification models
listed for each. Variables in bold are positively
associated with increases in diversification rates in the Asteraceae will allow us to better
correlated with diversification, variables in italics
understand the evolutionary history of the group, as well as predict the robustness of these are negatively correlated.
plants to changing environmental conditions.
b) Percentage of variation in diversification
attributable to environment for each tribe.

METHODS - Up to 57% of the variation in diversification rates across the 7 Asteraceae tribes is attributable to abiotic environmental factors.
Records for more than 500,000 plant collections - Geochemical and mineralogical variables are consistently more correlated with diversification rates than climate, topography or soil profile/texture.
were assembled, cleaned and curated from public databases.

A set of 187 environmental variables was compiled in four classes: - Several variables are commonly found to be correlated with diversity across clades: feldspars and clays both negatively and positively, and plagioclases only
Geochemistry (USGS OFR 2014-1082) negatively.
Soil profile and texture (SoilGrids250)
Climate (AdaptWest 1km) - A smaller number of variables are limited to single tribes (eg calcite in the Helenieae and zinc in Coreopsideae).
Topography (DEM-derived , via SoilGrids250)

A value for each environmental variable was extracted CONCLUSIONS

at every plant collection locality and averaged per species.
A phylogeny for 1,600 species across the 14 Asteraceae*
tribes was constructed using Open Tree Of Life with supplemental genetic and taxonomic
data.
Tip-rate correlation tests were run for each tribe individually using the Diversification Rate
Metric (Jetz et al., 2012).
Ordinary Least Squares were used to regress diversification rate against environmental
variables, and for multiple regressions across all pairwise non-autocorrelated combinations
of variables (A*B and A+B).
BIC and R2 were calculated for each of these models, with best (∆BIC < 3) retained.
Our results are consistent with parallel analyses showing that geochemistry is positively correlated with species diversity in the Asteraceae through space,
notably at local scales of only a few hundred kilometers. That several variables are commonly correlated with diversification rate across tribes is unsurprising
given their shared evolutionary history, however the identification of unique explanatory variables for certain lineages suggests specific factors might be
responsible for adaptive responses and niche specializations in those groups.
These findings highlight the importance of including geochemistry in models for the evolutionary history of plant diversity and distribution in North America
as well as in models predicting species responses under changing environmental conditions.
The Geo-Eco-Evo Working Group was funded by
the USGS John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis
and Synthesis, members: Brian Anacker (CU
Denver) Elisabeth Bui (CSIRO), Jennifer Cartwright
(USGS), Robert Edwards (Smithsonian), Martin
Goldhaber (USGS), Vicki Funk (Smithsonian), Chase
Mason (UCF), Joe Miller (NSF), Ian Pearse (USGS),
Pam Soltis (UF), Jim Thompson (USGS/WVU),
Travis Warren (USGS)

*(Geochemical data is available for the United States only, limiting our analyses using all Reference: Jetz, Thomas, Joy, Hartmann, & Mooers,
2012. The global diversity of birds in space and
four variable classes to this region and reducing the number of focal tribes to 7). time. Nature (491): 444-448.