Herbivores disrupt clinal variation in plant responses to water limitation

Plasticity in plant traits, including secondary metabolites, is critical to plant survival and competitiveness under stressful conditions. The ability of a plant to respond effectively to combined stressors can be impacted by crosstalk in biochemical pathways, resource availability, and evolutionary history, but such responses remain underexplored. In particular, we know little about intraspecific variation in response to combined stressors or whether such variation is associated with the stress history of a given population.
Here, we investigated the consequences of combined water and herbivory stress for plant traits, including relative growth rate, leaf morphology, and various measures of phytochemistry, using a common garden of Asclepias fascicularis milkweeds. To examine how plant trait means and plasticities depend on the history of environmental stress, seeds for the experiment were collected from across a gradient of aridity in the Great Basin, USA. We then conducted a factorial..., Study system
Asclepias fascicularis (narrowleaf milkweed) is one of the most widely distributed milkweed species in the western United States and an important food-plant species for the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus), among other specialist herbivores (Woodson 1954, Dilts et al. 2019). Narrowleaf milkweed is found across a wide range of water availabilities, including in very dry locations (down to at least 100 mm of annual precipitation) (Woodson 1954). Milkweeds are well known for their chemical defenses, which are sequestered by monarch butterflies. Unlike many milkweeds, A. fascicularis contains few cardiac glycosides, but the leaves contain high concentrations of flavonols and both leaves and roots contain diverse pregnane glycosides (Rasmann and Agrawal 2011, Mundim and Pringle 2020, Diethelm et al. 2022). Flavonols are hypothesized to play a role in the mitigation of plant water stress by functioning as antioxidants, and the biological role of the pregnane glycosides remain..., , This readme.txt file was generated on 2023-10-20 by Aramee Diethelm.

GENERAL INFORMATION
-Title of Dataset: \"Herbivores disrupt clinal variation in plant responses to water limitation\"

-Author Information:
A. Principal Investigator Contact Information
Name: EG Pringle
Institution: University of Nevada, Reno
Address: 1664 N Virginia St, Reno, NV 89557
Email: [e-mail]
B. Associate or Co-investigator Contact Information
Name: AC Diethelm
Institution: University of Nevada, Reno
Address: 1664 N Virginia St, Reno, NV 89557
Email: [e-mail]

-Year (MM/YYYY) and geographic location of data collection: 11/2016 - 11/2020 in Reno, NV

-Funding sources that supported the collection of the data:
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
Hitchcock Chemical Ecology Fellowship
University of Nevada, Reno
Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship
NSF DEB 2145757
Bureau of Land Management L20AC00440

SHARING/ACCESS INFORMATION
-Licenses/restrictions placed on the data: None
-Environmental variable...