Persistence of arctic-alpine flora during 24,000 years of environmental change in the Polar Urals

Abstract

Plants adapted to extreme conditions can be at high risk from climate change; arctic-alpine plants, in particular, could “run out of space” as they are out-competed by expansion of woody vegetation. Mountain regions could potentially provide safe sites for arctic-alpine plants in a warmer climate, but empirical evidence is fragmentary. Here we present a 24,000-year record of species persistence based on sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) from Lake Bolshoye Shchuchye (Polar Urals). We provide robust evidence of long-term persistence of arctic-alpine plants through large-magnitude climate changes but document a decline in their diversity during a past expansion of woody vegetation. Nevertheless, most of the plants that were present during the last glacial interval, including all of the arctic-alpines, are still found in the region today. This underlines the conservation significance of mountain landscapes via their provision of a range of habitats that confer resilience to climate change, particularly for arctic-alpine taxa.

The Treasure Vault Can be Opened: Large-Scale Genome Skimming Works Well Using Herbarium and Silica Gel Dried Material

“…Genetic and genomic data are of critical importance for many applications, including species delimitation [1][2][3], studies on evolution and phylogenies [4][5][6], biodiversity assessments and conservation [7,8], reconstructions of past plant communities [9][10][11], or for more applied tasks such as forensics [12,13], pollination and food web studies [14][15][16] and monitoring of invasive species [17]. While many of these tasks can be undertaken by sequencing plastid or rDNA amplicons [1,2,18,19], increasing emphasis has been given to the potential of using genomic data for DNA barcoding and wider phylogenomic studies [4,[20][21][22][23][24].…”

Holocene Vegetation and Plant Diversity Changes in the North-Eastern Siberian Treeline Region From Pollen and Sedimentary Ancient DNA

“…Recently, sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) analysis was established as a new paleoecological tool (Jørgensen et al, 2012;Pedersen et al, 2013;Willerslev et al, 2014;Epp et al, 2015;Parducci et al, 2017;Zimmermann et al, 2017;Clarke et al, 2018). The general g/h primers that amplify a part of the trnL P6 loop of the plant chloroplast genome (Taberlet et al, 2007) have been widely applied to identify vascular plants in various environmental samples (e.g., Jørgensen et al, 2012;Zimmermann et al, 2017;Clarke et al, 2019). The major advantages of sedaDNA over the classical methods are that more taxa can be identified to low taxonomic levels and it is well representative of the investigated site (Alsos et al, 2018).…”

Survival and spread of arctic plants in response to climate change: DNA-based evidence

“…in a recent study of a long (24 m) sediment core from Lake Bolshoye Shchuchye in the polar Ural Mountains of Arctic russia, Clarke et al (2019) assessed how the diversity of the arctic-alpine flora fared through largemagnitude climate changes over the past 24,000 years using sedaDNA analysis. The lake catchment has supported a typical arctic-alpine community over the last 24,000 years, while there has also been diversification through time to include shrub-tundra and boreal-forest taxa (Fig.…”

“…Tromsø University Museum, The Arctic University of Norway (UiT), Norway Figure 2: The ancient sediment DNA record from Lake Bolshoye Shchuchye shows the survival of arctic-alpine plants during a period when the climate was warmer, and shrubs (light green shaded bar) and trees (dark green shaded bar) expanded (modified from Clarke et al 2019). Each square represents one occurrence of the plant taxon, with a blue color ramp used to indicate how many of the eight replicates per sample the taxon was detected within.…”