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Climate and the U.S. distribution of C 4 grass subfamilies and decarboxylation variants of C 4 photosynthesis
Author(s) -
Taub Daniel R.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
american journal of botany
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.218
H-Index - 151
eISSN - 1537-2197
pISSN - 0002-9122
DOI - 10.2307/2656659
Subject(s) - biology , decarboxylation , photosynthesis , precipitation , botany , malic enzyme , ecology , enzyme , biochemistry , physics , meteorology , dehydrogenase , catalysis
I compared the C 4 grass flora and climatic records for 32 sites in the United States. Consistent with previous studies, I found that the proportion of the grass flora that uses the NADP malic enzyme (NADP‐ME) variant of C 4 photosynthesis greatly increases with increasing annual precipitation, while the proportion using the NAD malic enzyme (NAD‐ME) variant (and also the less common phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase [PCK] variant) decreases. However the association of grass subfamilies with annual precipitation was even stronger than for the C 4 decarboxylation variants. Analysis of the patterns of distribution by partial correlation analysis showed that the correlations between the frequency of various C 4 types and rainfall were solely due to the association of the C 4 types with particular grass subfamilies. In contrast, there was a strong correlation of the frequency of the different subfamilies with annual precipitation that was independent of the influence of the different C 4 variants. It therefore appears that other, as yet unidentified, characteristics that differ among grass subfamilies may be responsible for their differences in distribution across natural precipitation gradients.