Population structure and natural selection across a flower color polymorphism in the desert plant Encelia farinosa

Premise

Clines—or the geographic sorting of phenotypes across continual space—provide an opportunity to understand the interaction of dispersal, selection, and history in structuring polymorphisms.

Methods

In this study, we combine field-sampling, genetics, climatic analyses, and machine learning to understand a flower color polymorphism in the wide-ranging desert annual Encelia farinosa.

Results

We find evidence for replicated transitions in disk floret color from brown to yellow across spatial scales, with the most prominent cline stretching ~100 km from southwestern United States into México. Because population structure across the cline is minimal, selection is more likely than drift to have an important role in determining cline width.

Conclusions

Given that the cline aligns with a climatic transition but there is no evidence for pollinator preference for flower color, we hypothesize that floret color likely varies as a function of climatic conditions.