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Adaptation of Poa alpina to altitude and land use in the Swiss Alps

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Abstract

Current land use and climate change are prompting questions about the ability of plants to adapt to such environmental change. Therefore, we experimentally addressed plant performance and quantitative-genetic diversity of the common Alpine Meadow Grass Poa alpina. We asked how land use and altitude affect the occurrence of P. alpina in the field and whether its common-garden performance suggests adaptation to conditions at plant origin and differences in quantitative genetic diversity among plant origins. Among 216 candidate grassland sites of different land use and altitude from 12 villages in the Swiss Alps, P. alpina occurred preferentially in fertilized and grazed sites and at higher elevations. In a common garden at 1,500 m asl, we grew two plants of >600 genotypes representing 78 grassland sites. After 2 years, nearly 90% of all plants had reproduced. In agreement with adaptive advantages of vegetative reproduction at higher altitudes, only 23% of reproductive plants from lower altitudes reproduced via vegetative bulbils, but 55% of plants from higher altitudes. In agreement with adaptive advantages of reproduction in grazed sites, allocation to reproductive biomass was higher in plants from grazed grasslands than from mown ones. For 53 grasslands, we also investigated broad-sense heritability H2, which was significant for all studied traits and twice as high for grazed as for mown grasslands. Moreover, possibly associated with their higher landscape diversity, H2 was higher for sites of villages of Romanic cultural tradition than for those of Germanic and Walser traditions. We suggest promoting diverse land use regimes to conserve not only landscape and plant species diversity, but also adaptive genetic differentiation and heritable genetic variation.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Christine and Kai Huovinen-Hufschmid for providing land and care for our plants. We also thank numerous student workers for their great help in the field and lab, all municipalities and farmers for the permission to work on their land, and Mark van Kleunen, Oliver Bossdorf and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on previous drafts of the manuscript. This study was financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation SNF (grant 4048-064494/1 within the National Research Program 48 “Landscapes and Habitats of the Alps”).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Plant Sciences, Botanical Garden, and Oeschger Centre, University of Bern, Altenbergrain 21, 3013, Bern, Switzerland

    Markus Fischer

  2. Institute for Environmental Sciences and Evolution, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstr. 190, 8057, Zürich, Switzerland

    Anne Weyand

  3. Institute of Botany, University of Basel, Schönbeinstr. 6, 4056, Basel, Switzerland

    Katrin Rudmann-Maurer & Jürg Stöcklin

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  1. Markus Fischer
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Correspondence to Markus Fischer.

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Fischer, M., Weyand, A., Rudmann-Maurer, K. et al. Adaptation of Poa alpina to altitude and land use in the Swiss Alps. Alp Botany 121, 91–105 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00035-011-0096-2

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