Publication Date

7-1-2020

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Ecology and Evolution

Volume

10

Issue

13

DOI

10.1002/ece3.6396

First Page

6646

Last Page

6663

Abstract

Disentangling the strength and importance of barriers to reproduction that arise between diverging lineages is central to our understanding of species origin and maintenance. To date, the vast majority of studies investigating the importance of different barriers to reproduction in plants have focused on short-lived temperate taxa while studies of reproductive isolation in trees and tropical taxa are rare. Here, we systematically examine multiple barriers to reproduction in an Amazonian tree, Protium subserratum (Burseraceae) with diverging lineages of soil specialist ecotypes. Using observational, molecular, distributional, and experimental data, we aimed to quantify the contributions of individual prezygotic and postzygotic barriers including ecogeographic isolation, flowering phenology, pollinator assemblage, pollen adhesion, pollen germination, pollen tube growth, seed development, and hybrid fitness to total reproductive isolation between the ecotypes. We were able to identify five potential barriers to reproduction including ecogeographic isolation, phenological differences, differences in pollinator assemblages, differential pollen adhesion, and low levels of hybrid seed development. We demonstrate that ecogeographic isolation is a strong and that a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic prezygotic and postzygotic barriers may be acting to maintain near complete reproductive isolation between edaphically divergent populations of the tropical tree, P. subserratum.

Funding Number

DEB‐0909567

Funding Sponsor

National Science Foundation

Keywords

Amazon, postzygotic barrier, prezygotic barrier, reproductive isolation, speciation tropical tree

Comments

This is the Version of Record and can also be read online here.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Biological Sciences

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