ArticleAnnals of botany2026
Differentiation for drought strategy but conserved plasticity to heat and drought in locally adapted populations of Arabidopsis thaliana.
Article in Annals of botany, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Faster vegetative growth inmicroPublication biology · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
- Update of
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
aimsAdaptive plasticity may be crucial for plants to survive rapid environmental changes long enough for evolutionary adaptation to occur. Both heat and drought are abiotic stresses projected to increase globally, and their individual impact on plant growth and function has been well-characterized. Drought response, in particular, is categorized into three drought survival strategies: escape, avoidance and tolerance. However, to understand potential responses to climate change, we must manipulate multiple stressors simultaneously. We do not know what role plasticity to the combination of heat and drought plays in drought strategy or how plasticity will affect adaptation to projected future climates.
methodsWe measured heat- and drought-related traits as well as fitness in two locally adapted populations of Arabidopsis thaliana from Rödåsen, Sweden, and Castelnuovo di Porto, Italy. We used chamber common gardens that simulate the current autumn and spring climate in Sweden and a hotter and drier climate to identify population differentiation for trait means, trait plasticity and fitness. KEY
resultsPopulation differentiation in both treatments suggests that the Swedish population avoids drought by investing in stress-tolerant leaves while the Italian population escapes drought by flowering early. Despite these differences, there is little evidence for genetic differentiation of plasticity; when experiencing heat and drought, both populations shift their traits in the direction expected to avoid drought. Further, both populations have greatly decreased fitness in heat and drought.
conclusionsThese results highlight that locally adapted populations with genetic differentiation for traits within a single environment can respond to the same stressors with plasticity in the same direction. Further, the combination of increased heat and drought will be extremely damaging to plant populations.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.