Publication Overview
Abstract The distribution and co-occurrence of species are partly the outcome of their interactions
with environmental drivers. Drought is a key driver related to the distribution of plant species.
Drought events continue to increase in frequency and severity and identifying those aspects
of plant function that are related to drought is critical. Here, we perform a community-level
analysis of gene expression in relation to experimental drought and relate the similarity in
gene set enrichment across species to their natural co-occurrence. Species with similar gene
set enrichment in response to experimental drought tend to non-randomly co-occur in a
natural stand. We demonstrate that similarity in the transcriptomic response of species to
drought is a significantly better indicator of natural co-occurrence than measures of functional
trait similarity and phylogenetic relatedness and that transcriptomics has the capacity
to greatly enhance ecological investigations of species distributions and community structure.
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