The invasive plant Solidago canadensis exhibits partial local adaptation to low salinity at germination but not at later life‐history stages

Premise: Evolutionary adaptation may enable plants to inhabit a broad range of environments. However, germination and early life‐history stages have seldom been considered in estimates of evolutionary adaptation. Moreover, whether soil microbial communities can influence evolutionary adaptation in plants remains little explored.
Methods: We used reciprocal transplant experiments to investigate whether two populations of an invasive plant Solidago canadensis that occur in contrasting habitats of low versus high salinity expressed adaptation to the respective salinity levels. We germinated S. canadensis seeds collected from low‐and high‐salinity habitats under low‐ and high‐salt treatments. We also raised S. canadensis seedlings from the two salinity habitats under low‐ and high‐salt treatments and in the presence versus absence of microbial communities from the two habitats.
Results: Genotypes from a low‐salinity habitat had higher germination rates under low‐salt treatment than genotype..., Seed and soil sampling
In November 2016, we collected seeds and rhizospheric soil of S. canadensis in two contrasting habitats with low (inside a dam) and high (outside a dam) NaCl concentration near Haixing village in Zhejiang province (Table 1). The two habitats were separated by c.1000 m. Although high soil salinity may be due to high concentrations of Na+, K+, Mg2+, Ca2+, Cl-, SO42-, CO32- or HCO3- ions, high concentrations of NaCl is considered to be a major cause of soil salinity (Yadav et al., 2011). Therefore, we used NaCl content of the soil as an indicator of soil salinity. Accordingly, we considered soil inside the dam that had a NaCl concentration of 0.2% to represent low salinity while soil outside the dam that had a NaCl concentration of 0.4% to represent high salinity. We measured soil salinity in the two habitats by determining the total soluble salts by evaporation of a soil water extract (Bao, 1999). In each habitat, we collected seeds and rhizospheric soil from 10 ra..., , # The invasive plant Solidago canadensis exhibits partial local adaptation to low salinity at germination but not at later life‐history stages

This README file was generated on 2024-02-20 by Junmin Li.

Date of data collection: Data were collected on 2017

### Links to publications that cite or use the data

Jin HF, Yuan YG, Gao FL, Oduor AMO, Li JM. The invasive plant Solidago canadensis exhibits partial local adaptation to low salinity at germination but not at later life-history stages. American Journal of Botany, 2020, 107(4): 1C8

#### File description

Data is in a excel document with three sheets.

#### Description of the data

1. SO & SC sheet
Salt concentration: 1-high salt concentration, 2-low salt concentration
Seeds origin: 1- seeds collected from low salt concentration location; 2- seeds collected from high salt concentration location
Germination rate (%): The total number of seeds that germinated on the 12th day/ total number of seeds that had been place...