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Dryad

Range-wide study in a sexually polymorphic wild strawberry reveals climatic and soil associations of sex ratio, sexual dimorphism, and sex chromosomes

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Abstract

The contemporary environment, which influences local resource pools and mate access, is rapidly changing in the Anthropocene, posing unique challenges for sexually polymorphic plants. A landscape scale understanding of climate and soil drivers of sex-specific factors can help predict how global change will impact these species.

Using ~7,000 herbarium and iNaturalist specimens we determine how sex ratio, sexual dimorphism, and sex chromosomes vary with geographic, climatic and soil gradients in Fragaria virginiana and whether these conform to predictions from theory.

Sex ratio was hermaphrodite/male-biased and was driven more by soil attributes than climatological ones. Sex ratio-environment associations matched predictions for subdioecious species in the West but for gynodioecious species in the East. Climatic, not soil factors, affected sexual dimorphism in traits related to carbon acquisition but not mate access (petal size and flowering time). Greater sexual dimorphism was due to one sex being more responsive (females for leaf length and hermaphrodite/male for runnering while flowering) to precipitation or temperature. Sex chromosome variation was biased towards the ancestral type and frequencies varied with different environmental factors between East-West regions.

A landscape-level perspective of environmental drivers of sex-specific factors provides insight into how anthropogenic disturbance may impact sexually polymorphic species.