Evolution 2019: Urban Plant Evolution: A Case Study with Capsella bursa-pastoris in New York City

The percent of impervious surface increases as you move from rural to urban areas, with city centers having the highest percent impervious surface. In a Megapolis like New York CIty, there is a gradient from the core of the city to less urban areas. There is typically less available habitat for plants to grow in the urban core, as well as increased stressors like pollution and increased heat.

These stressors found in urban habitats are expected to change phenotypes, like time to maturation and seed set in plants such as Capsella bursa-pastoris. To test this hypothesis, Rebecca Panko and colleagues collected seeds plants from both urban and less-urban paired populations, raised the seeds up in the lab, then used those plants in reciprocal transplants to test if differences in time to maturity and seed set were caused by differences in the environment or if these were potentially traits under selection.

Rebecca found that plants at urban sites matured slower, regardless of where they originated from. Both plant types matured significantly faster in urban sites than less-urban sites. BUT because urban plant types take longer to mature COMPARED to less-urban plant types in BOTH sites (and significantly longer when in less-urban sites), it implies that they (urban plant types) may deal with stressful environments better: when urban plant types are “home” they mature slightly (NS) later whereas less-urban plants may bolt due to stress, when urban plant types are “away” (at less-urban sites) urban plants mature so slowly it is like they are on holiday.

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lindsaymilesphd

I'm a recent graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University in the Integrative Life Science Doctoral Program. Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Marc Johnson's EvoEco Lab at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

I am interested in urban ecology and evolution. Urbanization can have drastic impacts on local ecosystems, both negative and positive, and creates a new environment for organisms to experience. To understand the impacts that urbanization plays on organisms, I look through the lense of population genetics and molecular evolution.

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