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Native Americans domesticated maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) from lowland teosinte parviglumis (Zea mays ssp. parviglumis) in the warm Mexican southwest and brought it to the highlands of Mexico and South America where it was exposed to lower temperatures that imposed strong selection on flowering time. Phospholipids are important metabolites in plant responses to low-temperature and phosphorus availability and have been suggested to influence flowering time. Here, we combined linkage mapping with genome scans to identify High PhosphatidylCholine 1 (HPC1), a gene that encodes a phospholipase A1 enzyme, as a major driver of phospholipid variation in highland maize. Common garden experiments demonstrated strong genotype-by-environment interactions associated with variation at HPC1, with the highland HPC1 allele leading to higher fitness in highlands, possibly by hastening flowering. The highland maize HPC1 variant resulted in impaired function of the encoded protein due to a polymorphism in a highly conserved sequence. A meta-analysis across HPC1 orthologs indicated a strong association between the identity of the amino acid at this position and optimal growth in prokaryotes. Mutagenesis of HPC1 via genome editing validated its role in regulating phospholipid metabolism. Finally, we showed that the highland HPC1 allele entered cultivated maize by introgression from the wild highland teosinte Zea mays ssp. mexicana and has been maintained in maize breeding lines from the Northern United States, Canada, and Europe. Thus, HPC1 introgressed from teosinte mexicana underlies a large metabolic QTL that modulates phosphatidylcholine levels and has an adaptive effect at least in part via induction of early flowering time.

Simple Summary: Land reclamation and ecological restoration are required to mitigate land surface disturbances associated with natural gas extraction in the western United States. Traditional focus on these lands has been to stabilize soil to prevent erosion, though more recently, there has been an emphasis on restoring ecosystem services. Insects provide numerous ecosystem services and can be considered indicators of success for ecological restoration projects. It has been suggested that creating spatial and temporal mosaics of flowering plants will be necessary for pollinator conservation. In this study, we found insect abundance to be significantly higher on sites undergoing restoration than in adjacent reference areas during early and late growing season within the Jonah Infill natural gas field in Sublette County, Wyoming, USA. Family richness was significantly higher on well pads in the late season compared to reference sites. While our study only looked at sites within the Jonah Infill and had limited scope in terms of seed mixes, our results are promising and suggest that further work be done to investigate the efficacy of flowering plants on increasing insect abundance and richness in future restoration projects associated with oil and natural gas development. Insects are critical components of terrestrial ecosystems and are often considered ecosystem engineers. Due to the vast amount of ecosystem services they provide, because statistically valid samples can be captured in short durations, and because they respond rapidly to environmental change, insects have been used as indicators of restoration success and ecosystem functionality. In Wyoming (USA), ecological restoration required on thousands of acres of land surface have been disturbed to extract natural gas. In this study, we compared early seral reclamation sites to reference areas at two points within a growing season. We compared insect abundance and family richness on 6 natural gas well pads with early season perennial forbs and 6 well pads with the late season to insect communities on adjacent reference areas. A total of 237 individual insects were found on early season reclaimed sites compared to 84 on reference sites, while 858 insects were found on late season reclaimed sites compared to 38 on reference sites. Insect abundance was significantly higher on reclaimed well pads compared to reference areas at both points in the growing season, while reclaimed sites had significantly higher Shannon Diversity Index in early season and significantly higher family richness in late season compared to their paired reference sites. We also found interesting differences in abundance at family levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seed transfer guidelines are used to guide the human‐mediated movement of plant propagules from collection to recipient sites and are designed to minimize the risk of introducing maladapted genotypes. The spatial scale of adaptation, however, is unknown for most species, making it difficult to assess the potential negative impacts of seed transfer. In this study, we generated seed transfer guidelines for an ecologically important shrub, alder‐leaf mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus montanus). We plant material from 24 populations of C. montanus along a latitudinal transect from the southern Rocky Mountains of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. Seeds and seedlings were sown and planted separately in common garden experimental sites representing dissimilar environments. We measured plant germination, survival, growth, and leaf morphology for three growing seasons, and found significant variation among populations. Environmental and genetic distance were useful predictors of population performance in our common garden trials, which we use to recommend broad‐scale seed transfer guidelines to minimize risk of maladaptation to restoration sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Premise: Monardella villosa is an evolutionarily young species complex distributed across a large geographic range. Our goal was to determine whether the phenotypic difference between two subspecies of M. villosa was heritable and whether the alternative phenotypes were adaptive to their respective local habitats. Methods: We collected seeds from 25 populations of M. villosa, 14 from subspecies franciscana, which grows closer to the coast, and 11 from subspecies villosa, which has a larger and more inland geographic distribution. We reciprocally transplanted the two subspecies into their respective habitats and compared plant germination, post‐emergence survival, and growth. We used linear mixed models to quantify the effects of genotype and environment to determine whether subspecies were locally adapted and whether leaf traits that distinguish these subspecies were genetically based. Results: Plants of both subspecies grown at the coastal site had significantly lower survival and biomass than the inland site. The subspecies were not locally adapted; however, the coastal subspecies franciscana did have a home site advantage. We also found that distinctive leaf morphological traits were genetically based, with high broad‐sense heritability of traits. Conclusions: The two subspecies of Monardella villosa were not locally adapted to their respective habitat, but rather we found that selection for local genotypes may be stronger at the coastal site. Despite the lack of evidence for local adaptation in the strict sense, the subspecies had heritable variation in several leaf phenotypes, indicating that heterogeneous selection imposes an adaptive trade‐off for leaf trichome production within this species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]