Historical reconstruction unveils the risk of mass mortality and ecosystem collapse during pancontinental megadrought.

An important new hypothesis in landscape ecology is that extreme, decade-scale megadroughts can be potent drivers of rapid, macroscale ecosystem degradation and collapse. If true, an increase in such events under climate change could have devastating consequences for global biodiversity. However, because few megadroughts have occurred in the modern ecological era, the taxonomic breadth, trophic depth, and geographic pattern of these impacts remain unknown. Here we use ecohistorical techniques to quantify the impact of a record, pancontinental megadrought period (1891 to 1903 CE) on the Australian biota. We show that during this event mortality and severe stress was recorded in >45 bird, mammal, fish, reptile, and plant families in arid, semiarid, dry temperate, and Mediterranean ecosystems over at least 2.8 million km2 (36%) of the Australian continent. Trophic analysis reveals a bottom-up pattern of mortality concentrated in primary producer, herbivore, and omnivore guilds. Spatial and temporal reconstruction of premortality rainfall shows that mass mortality and synchronous ecosystem-wide collapse emerged in multiple geographic hotspots after 2 to 4 y of severe (>40%) and intensifying rainfall deficits. However, the presence of hyperabundant herbivores significantly increased the sensitivity of ecosystems to overgrazing-induced meltdown and permanent ecosystem change. The unprecedented taxonomic breadth and spatial scale of these impacts demonstrate that continental-scale megadroughts pose a major future threat to global biodiversity, especially in ecosystems affected by intensive agricultural use, trophic simplification, and invasive species.

Response of an invasive native wetland plant to environmental flows: implications for managing regulated floodplain ecosystems.

The natural flow regimes of rivers underpin the health and function of floodplain ecosystems. However, infrastructure development and the over-extraction of water has led to the alteration of natural flow regimes, resulting in the degradation of river and floodplain habitats globally. In many catchments, including Australia's Murray-Darling Basin, environmental flows are seen as a potentially useful tool to restore natural flow regimes and manage the degradation of rivers and their associated floodplains. In this paper, we investigated whether environmental flows can assist in controlling an invasive native floodplain plant in Barmah Forest, south-eastern Australia. We experimentally quantified the effects of different environmental flow scenarios, including a shallow (20 cm) and deeper (50 cm) flood of different durations (12 and 20 weeks), as well as drought and soil-saturated conditions, on the growth and survival of seedlings of Juncus ingens, a native emergent macrophyte that has become invasive in some areas of Barmah Forest following river regulation and alteration of natural flow regimes. Three height classes of J. ingens (33 cm, 17 cm and 12 cm) were included in the experiment to explicitly test for relationships between treatments, plant survival and growth, and plant height. We found that seedling mortality occurred in the drought treatment and in the 20-week flood treatments of both depths; however, mortality rates in the flood treatments depended on initial plant height, with medium and short plants (initial heights of ≤17 cm) exhibiting the highest mortality rates. Both the 20 cm and 50 cm flood treatments of only 12 weeks duration were insufficient to cause mortality in any of the height classes; indeed, shoots of plants in the 20 cm flood treatment were able to elongate through the water surface at rapid rates. Our findings have important implications for management of Barmah Forest and floodplain ecosystems elsewhere, as it demonstrates the potential for using environmental flows to limit the spread of invasive plants by targeting a life-stage that is particularly sensitive to prolonged submergence. However, there may be narrow thresholds between the conditions that provide effective control of an invasive species, and those that instead facilitate growth and may promote further invasion.

Implications of the 2019-2020 megafires for the biogeography and conservation of Australian vegetation.

Australia's 2019-2020 'Black Summer' bushfires burnt more than 8 million hectares of vegetation across the south-east of the continent, an event unprecedented in the last 200 years. Here we report the impacts of these fires on vascular plant species and communities. Using a map of the fires generated from remotely sensed hotspot data we show that, across 11 Australian bioregions, 17 major native vegetation groups were severely burnt, and up to 67-83% of globally significant rainforests and eucalypt forests and woodlands. Based on geocoded species occurrence data we estimate that >50% of known populations or ranges of 816 native vascular plant species were burnt during the fires, including more than 100 species with geographic ranges more than 500 km across. Habitat and fire response data show that most affected species are resilient to fire. However, the massive biogeographic, demographic and taxonomic breadth of impacts of the 2019-2020 fires may leave some ecosystems, particularly relictual Gondwanan rainforests, susceptible to regeneration failure and landscape-scale decline.

Empirical evidence of fixed and homeostatic patterns of polyploid advantage in a keystone grass exposed to drought and heat stress.

A long-standing hypothesis in evolutionary biology is that polyploid plants have a fitness advantage over diploids in climatically variable or extreme habitats. Here we provide the first empirical evidence that polyploid advantage in these environments is caused by two distinct processes: homeostatic maintenance of reproductive output under elevated abiotic stress, and fixed differences in seed development. In an outdoor climate manipulation experiment using coastal to inland Australian populations of the perennial grass Themeda triandra Forssk., we found that total output of viable seed in drought- and heat-stressed tetraploid plants was over four times higher than in diploids, despite being equal under more favourable growing conditions. Tetraploids also consistently produced heavier seeds with longer hygroscopic awns, traits which increase propagule fitness in extreme environments. These differences add to fitness benefits associated with broader-scale local adaptation of inland T. triandra populations to drought stress. Our study provides evidence that nucleotypic effects of genome size and increased reproductive flexibility can jointly underlie polyploid advantage in plants in stressful environments, and argue that ploidy can be an important criterion for selecting plant populations for use in genetic rescue, restoration and revegetation projects, including in habitats affected by climate change.

Nonindigenous Plant Advantage in Native and Exotic Australian Grasses under Experimental Drought, Warming, and Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment.

A general prediction of ecological theory is that climate change will favor invasive nonindigenous plant species (NIPS) over native species. However, the relative fitness advantage enjoyed by NIPS is often affected by resource limitation and potentially by extreme climatic events such as drought. Genetic constraints may also limit the ability of NIPS to adapt to changing climatic conditions. In this study, we investigated evidence for potential NIPS advantage under climate change in two sympatric perennial stipoid grasses from southeast Australia, the NIPS Nassella neesiana and the native Austrostipa bigeniculata. We compared the growth and reproduction of both species under current and year 2050 drought, temperature and CO2 regimes in a multifactor outdoor climate simulation experiment, hypothesizing that NIPS advantage would be higher under more favorable growing conditions. We also compared the quantitative variation and heritability of growth traits in populations of both species collected along a 200 km climatic transect. In contrast to our hypothesis we found that the NIPS N. neesiana was less responsive than A. bigeniculata to winter warming but maintained higher reproductive output during spring drought. However, overall tussock expansion was far more rapid in N. neesiana, and so it maintained an overall fitness advantage over A. bigeniculata in all climate regimes. N. neesiana also exhibited similar or lower quantitative variation and growth trait heritability than A. bigeniculata within populations but greater variability among populations, probably reflecting a complex past introduction history. We found some evidence that additional spring warmth increases the impact of drought on reproduction but not that elevated atmospheric CO2 ameliorates drought severity. Overall, we conclude that NIPS advantage under climate change may be limited by a lack of responsiveness to key climatic drivers, reduced genetic variability in range-edge populations, and complex drought-CO2 interactions.

Rapid development of adaptive, climate-driven clinal variation in seed mass in the invasive annual Forb Echium plantagineum L.

We examined adaptive clinal variation in seed mass among populations of an invasive annual species, Echium plantagineum, in response to climatic selection. We collected seeds from 34 field populations from a 1,000 km long temperature and rainfall gradient across the species' introduced range in south-eastern Australia. Seeds were germinated, grown to reproductive age under common glasshouse conditions, and progeny seeds were harvested and weighed. Analyses showed that seed mass was significantly related to climatic factors, with populations sourced from hotter, more arid sites producing heavier seeds than populations from cooler and wetter sites. Seed mass was not related to edaphic factors. We also found that seed mass was significantly related to both longitude and latitude with each degree of longitude west and latitude north increasing seed mass by around 2.5% and 4% on average. There was little evidence that within-population or between-population variation in seed mass varied in a systematic manner across the study region. Our findings provide compelling evidence for development of a strong cline in seed mass across the geographic range of a widespread and highly successful invasive annual forb. Since large seed mass is known to provide reproductive assurance for plants in arid environments, our results support the hypothesis that the fitness and range potential of invasive species can increase as a result of genetic divergence of populations along broad climatic gradients. In E. plantagineum population-level differentiation has occurred in 150 years or less, indicating that the adaptation process can be rapid.

Enemy release after introduction of disease-resistant genotypes into plant-pathogen systems.

Predicting the magnitude of enemy release in host-pathogen systems after introduction of novel disease resistance genes has become a central problem in ecology. Here, we develop a general quantitative framework for predicting changes in realized niche size and intrinsic population growth rate after introgression of disease resistance genes into wild host populations. We then apply this framework to a model host-pathogen system targeted by genetically modified and conventionally bred disease-resistant host lines (Trifolium repens lines expressing resistance to Clover yellow vein potyvirus) and show that, under a range of ecologically realistic conditions, the introduction of novel pathogen resistance genes into host populations can pose a quantifiable risk to associated nontarget native plant communities. In the host-pathogen system studied, we predict that pathogen release could result in an increase in the intrinsic rate of population growth of up to 15% and the expansion of host populations into some marginal environments. This approach has general applicability to the ecological risk assessment of all novel disease-resistant plant genotypes that target coevolutionary host-pathogen systems for improvement of agricultural productivity.

Growth, fecundity and competitive ability of transgenic Trifolium subterraneum subsp. subterraneum cv. Leura expressing a sunflower seed albumin gene.

Ecological risk assessment is an important step in the production and commercialisation of transgenic plants. To date, however, most risk assessment studies have been performed on crop plants, and few have considered the ecological consequences associated with genetic modification of pasture species. In this study we compared the growth, yield, population dynamics and competitive ability of transgenic Trifolium subterraneum subsp. subterraneum cv. Leura (subclover) expressing a nutritive sunflower seed albumin (ssa) gene with the equivalent non-transgenic commercial line in a glasshouse competition trial. Plants were grown in low-fertility soil typical of unimproved native southeastern Australian grasslands. We measured survivorship, seed production rate, seed germination rate, seed weight, dry weight yield and the intrinsic rate of population increase (lambda) of plants grown in mixtures and monocultures over a range of densities (250 to 2000 plants m(-2)), and also determined intragenotypic and intergenotypic competition coefficients for each line. There were no significant differences between transgenic and non-transgenic plants in any of the measured variables except survivorship; transgenic plants had a significantly lower survival rate than non-transgenic plants when grown at high densities (p<0.01). However, density-dependent effects were observed for all measured variables, and in all models plant density affected the response variables more than the presence of the transgene. Based on these results, we conclude that the ssa gene construct appears to confer no advantage to transgenic T. s. subterraneum cv. Leura growing in mixed or pure swards under the fertility and density regimes examined in the trial. Our data also suggest that transgenic subterranean clover expressing the ssa gene is unlikely to exhibit a competitive advantage over associated non-transgenic commercial cultivars when grown in dense swards in low-fertility pastures.