Transgenerational and within-generation plasticity in response to climate change: insights from a manipulative field experiment across an elevational gradient

Parental environmental effects, or transgenerational plasticity, can influence an individual’s phenotype or fitness, yet remain underexplored in the context of global change. Using the perennial self-pollinating plant Boechera stricta, we explored the effects of climate change on transgenerational and within-generation plasticity in dormancy, germination, growth, and survival. We first conducted a snow removal experiment in the field, in which we transplanted 16 families of known origin into three common gardens at different elevations and exposed half of the siblings to contemporary snow dynamics and half to early snow removal. We planted the offspring of these individuals in a factorial manipulation of temperature and water level in the growth chamber, and reciprocally transplanted them across all parental environments in the field. The growth chamber experiment revealed that the effects of transgenerational plasticity persist in traits expressed after establishment, even when account...

亲本环境效应，即跨代可塑性（transgenerational plasticity），可影响个体的表型（phenotype）与适合度（fitness），但在全球变化背景下该研究方向仍未得到充分探索。本研究以多年生自交繁殖植物严格弯蕊芥（Boechera stricta）为实验材料，探讨了气候变化对休眠、萌发、生长及存活相关性状的跨代可塑性与代内可塑性（within-generation plasticity）的影响。我们首先开展了野外积雪移除实验：将16个已知起源的家系移栽至3个不同海拔的共同花园（common garden）中，并将一半同胞子代置于现有积雪动态环境，另一半则接受早期积雪移除处理。随后，我们将这些植株的子代种植于生长箱中，开展温度与水位的析因操控实验，并将其反向移栽至所有亲本所处的野外环境。生长箱实验结果表明，即使在考虑……的情况下，跨代可塑性的效应仍会在定植后表达的性状中持续存在。