Back

Local extirpation is pervasive among populations of Galapagos endemic tomatoes

Gibson, M. J.; Torres, M. d. L.; Moyle, L. C.

2019-10-22 evolutionary biology
10.1101/814160 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The Galapagos Islands are home to incredible endemic biodiversity that is of high conservation interest. Two such endemic species are the Galapagos tomatoes: Solanum cheesmaniae and Solanum galapagense. Both are known from historical location records, but like many endemic plant species on the Galapagos, their current conservation status is unclear. We revisited previously documented sites of endemic species on San Cristobal, Santa Cruz, and Isabela, and document the disappearance of >80% of these populations. In contrast, we find that two invasive relatives (Solanum pimpinellifolium and Solanum lycopersicum) are now highly abundant, and in some cases--based on morphological observations--might be hybridizing with endemics. Our findings suggest that expanding human developments and putative interspecific hybridization are among the major factors affecting the prevalence of invasives and the threatened persistence of the endemic populations.

Matching journals

The top 9 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.