Plant Life History Adaptation in Response to Environmental Stresses: Genetic Correlations and Tradeoffs.

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9419800 Stanton Because increasing demand leads to expansion of agriculture into marginal lands, and because intensive farming methods often decrease soil quality, understanding the consequences of environmental stress for plant populations is becoming increasingly important. Environmental stresses may both affect the productivity of individual plants and act as selective forces favoring the evolution of particular combinations of traits in plant populations. This research will investigate the costs and benefits of evolutionary changes in plant populations cultured in stressful environments. It will determine whether selection for survival under one sort of stress improves tolerance of other stresses, and examine the trade-off between stress tolerance and maximum yield. Plants will be grown for several generations under a range of environmental conditions (high salt, high boron, low light, low nutrients, low water, and optimal conditions) at crowded and uncrowded densities. Finally, seeds from each population will be grown across the whole range of test conditions to determine how adaptation to individual stresses affects tolerance to other stresses and growth and productivity under favorable conditions. The results should have significant implications for sustainable agriculture and for directing development of stress-tolerant strains of commercial crop species.