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Evolution of serotiny in maritime pine (Pinus pinaster) in the light of increasing frequency of fires

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Abstract

Wildfire frequency and intensity in the Mediterranean region are predicted to increase with climate and anthropogenic changes in the following decades. Pines species often posses fire-embracing and fire-avoiding strategies that increase the probability of persistence and performance in fire-prone habitats. One such strategy is serotiny, i.e., the capacity to retain seeds in long-closed cones within the plant canopy; serotinous cones release seeds only when either a fire or a heat shock occurs. In this work, we used a simulation approach and Pinus pinaster populations as a model system to investigate how (i) an increased frequency of fire, (ii) genetic characteristics of serotiny, and (iii) observed differences in life histories interact to determine (a) risk of local population extinction and (b) temporal changes in the prevalence of serotiny in the modeled population. In addition, we tested whether the contemporary evolution of serotiny in the face of increased probability of occurrence of fires increased the probability of population persistence with respect to a scenario in which serotiny was not allowed to evolve. Our simulations showed that over the 300 years of simulated time, the evolution of serotiny did not substantially contribute to the persistence of populations. Extinction risk increased with the increasing probability of occurrence of fire and slightly decreased with (i) higher gene flow from outside the modeled population, and (ii) higher prevalence of serotiny at the beginning of the simulation. The prevalence of serotiny at the end of simulation time was difficult to predict and mostly driven by stochasticity.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Stefano Leonardi and William H. Satterthwaite for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Simone Vincenzi is supported by an IOF Marie Curie Fellowship FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IOF for the project “RAPIDEVO” on rapid evolutionary responses to climate change in natural populations and by the Center for Stock Assessment Research (CSTAR). Andrea Piotti is supported by the Italian MIUR project “Approccio multitaxa allo studio delle risposte della biodiversità italiana al cambiamento climatico” (RBAP10A2T4).

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  1. Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Via Ponzio 34/5, 20133, Milan, Italy

    Simone Vincenzi

  2. Center for Stock Assessment Research and Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, USA

    Simone Vincenzi

  3. Institute of Biosciences and BioResources, National Research Council, Via Madonna del Piano 10, 50019, Sesto Fiorentino, FI, Italy

    Andrea Piotti

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Correspondence to Simone Vincenzi.

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Communicated by Thomas Abeli, Rodolfo Gentili and Anne Jäkäläniemi.

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Vincenzi, S., Piotti, A. Evolution of serotiny in maritime pine (Pinus pinaster) in the light of increasing frequency of fires. Plant Ecol 215, 689–701 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11258-014-0342-y

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