Recent and ancient evolutionary events shaped plant elemental composition of edaphic endemics: a phylogeny‐wide analysis of Iberian gypsum plants

What is it about?

What determines the elemental composition of plants? We evaluated the effect of the phylogeny, climate, soil conditions and ecological adaptation to gypsum soils on the elemental composition of Iberian gypsum plants. We found out that the evolutionary history of Iberian gypsum plants shaped their chemical composition, both at ancient (120 MY) and recent (3-15 MY) divergence times. However, the effect of plant adaptation to gypsum was also remarkable: gypsum endemic plants converged on similar metabolic solutions to deal with high gypsum soils, involving higher leaf S and Mg concentrations.

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