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Climate and the U.S. distribution of C₄ grass subfamilies and decarboxylation variants of C₄ photosynthesis¹

⁰ Department of Ecology and Evolution, State University of New York, Stony Brook, New York 11794 USA

ABSTRACT

I compared the C₄ 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 C₄ 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 C₄ decarboxylation variants. Analysis of the patterns of distribution by partial correlation analysis showed that the correlations between the frequency of various C₄ types and rainfall were solely due to the association of the C₄ 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 C₄ 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.

Key Words: climate • C₄ photosynthesis • grasses • NAD-ME photosynthesis • NADP-ME photosynthesis • PCK photosynthesis • Poaceae • precipitation

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