Environmental filtering of life-history trait diversity in urban populations of Arabidopsis thaliana

The challenges to which plants are exposed in urban environments represent, in miniature, the challenges plants face as a result of global environmental change. Hence, urban habitats provide a unique opportunity to assess whether processes of local adaptation are taking place despite the short temporal and geographical scales that characterize the Anthropocene. We quantified the ecological diversity of urban habitats hosting A. thaliana populations. Using plant community indicators, we show that these patches differ in their levels of soil nutrient content and disturbance. Accordingly, plants in each patch displayed a range of flowering time, size and fitness. Using a deep sampling approach coupled with reduced genome-sequencing, we demonstrate that most individuals can be assigned to a limited set of clonal lineages; the genetic diversity of these lineages is a sample of the diversity observed in western European populations of the species, indicating that established urban populations..., , , # Environmental filtering of life-history trait diversity in urban populations of Arabidopsis thaliana

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fxpnvx0zh](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fxpnvx0zh)

Materials and Methods

Study area
Our study focused on urban A. thaliana populations in the city of Cologne, situated in midwestern Germany (about 50.9°N, 7.0°E). Cologne is Germany’s fourth most populous city, with more than one  million inhabitants (Ansmann et al., 2021). One of Germany's warmest cities, it has a temperate oceanic climate with a mean annual temperature of 11.7 °C during the day and 6.3 °C at night, and a mean annual precipitation of 840 mm.
Field surveys, phenology monitoring, and functional trait measurements

We surveyed eight A. thaliana populations within a 4.3 x 3.7 km area in southwestern Cologne. Study populations were selected based on their accessibility and on their isolation from other populations, with all habitat patches located at least 0.6 km from one another. Urban ha...