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Reproductive and early‐acting life‐history traits are likely to be particularly important determinants of plant fitness under a changing climate. There have, however, been few robust tests of the evolution of these traits under chronic climate change in natural ecosystems. Such studies are urgently needed, to evaluate the contribution of evolutionary change to population persistence.Here, we examine climate‐driven evolutionary change in reproductive and early‐acting plant life‐history traits in the long‐lived perennial plant, Festuca ovina.We collected established plants of F. ovina from species‐rich calcareous grassland at the Buxton Climate Change Impacts Laboratory (BCCIL), after 17 years of in situ experimental drought treatment.P1 plants collected from drought‐treated and control (ambient climate) plots at BCCIL were used to create an open‐pollinated F1 progeny array, which was subsequently validated using microsatellite markers to establish a robust bi‐parental pedigree. We measured the timing of germination and seed mass in the F1 progeny, the P1 paternal contribution to F1 offspring (paternal reproductive success), and assessed the effects of flowering time on the mating system.F1 seed with ancestry in drought‐treated plots at BCCIL germinated significantly later than seed derived from individuals from control plots. P1 plants from the drought treatment flowered significantly earlier than those from the control plots in summer 2012, but not in 2013. Male reproductive success was also lower in P1 plants collected from drought plots than those from control plots. Furthermore, our pedigree revealed that mating among parents of the F1 progeny had been assortative with respect to flowering time.Synthesis. Our study shows that chronic drought treatment at Buxton Climate Change Impacts Laboratory has driven rapid evolutionary change in reproductive and early‐acting life‐history traits in Festuca ovina, and suggests that evolutionary differentiation may be reinforced through changes in flowering time that reduce the potential for gene flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetic diversity may play an important role in allowing individual species to resist climate change, by permitting evolutionary responses. Our understanding of the potential for such responses to climate change remains limited, and very few experimental tests have been carried out within intact ecosystems. Here, we use amplified fragment length polymorphism ( AFLP) data to assess genetic divergence and test for signatures of evolutionary change driven by long-term simulated climate change applied to natural grassland at Buxton Climate Change Impacts Laboratory ( BCCIL). Experimental climate treatments were applied to grassland plots for 15 years using a replicated and spatially blocked design and included warming, drought and precipitation treatments. We detected significant genetic differentiation between climate change treatments and control plots in two coexisting perennial plant study species ( Festuca ovina and Plantago lanceolata). Outlier analyses revealed a consistent signature of selection associated with experimental climate treatments at individual AFLP loci in P. lanceolata, but not in F. ovina. Average background differentiation at putatively neutral AFLP loci was close to zero, and genomewide genetic structure was associated neither with species abundance changes (demography) nor with plant community-level responses to long-term climate treatments. Our results demonstrate genetic divergence in response to a suite of climatic environments in reproductively mature populations of two perennial plant species and are consistent with an evolutionary response to climatic selection in P. lanceolata. These genetic changes have occurred in parallel with impacts on plant community structure and may have contributed to the persistence of individual species through 15 years of simulated climate change at BCCIL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1. Understanding the effects of intraspecific genetic diversity on the structure and functioning of ecological communities is a fundamentally important part of evolutionary ecology and may also have conservation relevance in identifying the situations in which genetic diversity coincides with species-level diversity. 2. Early studies within this field documented positive relationships between genetic diversity and ecological structure, but recent studies have challenged these findings. Conceptual synthesis has been hampered because studies have used different measures of intraspecific variation (phenotypically adaptive vs. neutral) and have considered different measures of ecological structure in different ecological and spatial contexts. The aim of this study is to strengthen conceptual understanding by providing an empirical synthesis quantifying the relationship between genetic diversity and ecological structure. 3. Here, I present a meta-analysis of the relationship between genetic diversity within plant populations and the structure and functioning of associated ecological communities (including 423 effect sizes from 70 studies). I used Bayesian meta-analyses to examine (i) the strength and direction of this relationship, (ii) the extent to which phenotypically adaptive and neutral (molecular) measures of diversity differ in their association with ecological structure and (iii) variation in outcomes among different measures of ecological structure and in different ecological contexts. 4. Effect sizes measuring the relationship between adaptive diversity (genotypic richness) and both communityand ecosystem-level ecological responses were small, but significantly positive. These associations were supported by genetic effects on species richness and productivity, respectively. 5. There was no overall association between neutral genetic diversity and measures of ecological structure, but a positive correlation was observed under a limited set of demographic conditions. These results suggest that adaptive and neutral genetic diversity should not be treated as ecologically equivalent measures of intraspecific variation. 6. Synthesis. This study advances the debate over whether relationships between genetic diversity and ecological structure are either simply positive or negative, by showing how the strength and direction of these relationships changes with different measures of diversity and in different ecological contexts. The results provide a solid foundation for assessing when and where an expanded synthesis between ecology and genetics will be most fruitful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is becoming apparent that genetic diversity can influence the species diversity and structure of ecological communities. Here, we investigated the intraspecific trait variation responsible for this relationship We grew 10 genotypes of the sedge Carex caryophyllea, as monocultures, under standardized conditions and measured traits related to morphology, growth, and life history. The same genotypes had been prominent in determining the structure of multispecies experimental communities, equivalent in species diversity, in which the genetic diversity of the constituent plant species had been varied in parallel. The trait measurements revealed substantial phenotypic variation among Carex genotypes, related predominantly to differences in physical size and to the spatial deployment of above- and belowground tissue. Genotypes successful in experimental communities were larger in size and tended to adopt a "guerrilla" clonal growth strategy. In general, multivariate trait summaries of genotype size (and to a lesser extent, variation along a linear discriminant axis) predicted genotype and species abundance in experimental communities. However, one genotype exhibited a large disparity in this respect. The performance of this genotype lay closer to prediction when it was growing with a highly competitive grass genotype. The strength of the relationship between genotype size and performance within communities decreased with decreasing community genetic diversity. These results indicate that intraspecific trait measurements are useful for predicting and understanding community structure. They also imply that competitive interactions between the genotypes of different species play an increased role in determining phenotype in genetically impoverished communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1. A recent experiment varied the genetic diversity of model grassland communities under standardized soil and management conditions and at constant initial species diversity. After 5 years’ growth, genetically diverse communities retained more species diversity and became more similar in species composition than genetically impoverished communities. 2. Here we present the results of further investigation within this experimental system. We proposed that two mechanisms – the first invoking genetically determined and constant differences in plant phenotypes and the second invoking genotype–environment interactions – could each underpin these results. This mechanistic framework was used as a tool to interpret our findings. 3. We used inter-simple sequence repeat (ISSR) DNA markers to confirm which of the individuals of six study species initially included in the model communities were unique genotypes. We then used the molecular markers to assess the survival and abundance of each genotype at the end of the 5-year experimental period. 4. The DNA marker data were used to create, for the first time, a genotype abundance hierarchy describing the structure of a community at the level of genotypes. This abundance hierarchy revealed wide variation in the abundance of genotypes within species, and large overlaps in the performance of the genotypes of different species. 5. Each genotype achieved a consistent level of abundance within genetically diverse communities, which differed from that attained by other genotypes of the same species. The abundance hierarchy of genotypes within species also showed consistency across communities differing in their initial level of genetic diversity, such that species abundance in genetically impoverished communities could be predicted, in part, by genotypic identity. 6. Three species (including two canopy-dominants) experienced shifts in their community-level genotype abundance hierarchies that were consistent with an increased influence of genotype–environment interactions in genetically impoverished communities. 7. Our results indicate that under relatively constant environmental conditions the species abundance structure of plant communities can in part be predicted from the genotypic composition of their component populations. Genotype–environment interactions also appear to shape the structure of communities under such conditions, although further experiments are needed to clarify the magnitude and mechanism of these effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]