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The size differs more than fluctuating asymmetry in Ficaria verna (Ranunculaceae) populations around a woodland
Introduction Local community assemblages are ‘filtered’ by dispersal, abiotic, and competition factors (Houseman and Gross, 2006; Myers and Harms, 2009) which lead to the establishment of populations with traits or phenotypes, characteristics to that habitat (Pavoine et al., 2011; Kraft et al., 2015). Understanding the spatiotemporal variability of plant communities has relied on measuring functional traits (Mabry et al., 2000; Cornelissen et al., 2003) on indicator species (Verheyen and Hermy, 2001; Diekmann, 2003) which allow us to assess the quality of a certain habitat, area, landscape quantitatively (Dwyer and Laughlin, 2017). Woodland habitats are of particular interest, as strong associations have been found between certain plant functional traits to environmental factors such as canopy cover (Jennings et al., 1999), soil pH (Hipps et al., 2005), soil water content (Leuschner and Lendzion, 2009), and competition with neighbouring species (Levine, 2000; Callaway, 2007). These variables interact can with each other, creating a vertically and horizontally heterogeneous habitat (Xiong et al., 2003; Niinemets and Valladares, 2004). Environmental limitation on clonal herbs can lead to ecological exclusion during different life stages (Verheyen and Hermy, 2001; Baeten et al., 2009). Clonal reproduction has numerous advantages (Whigham and Chapa, 1999) but plants need to compensate for their low genetic variability by phenotypic plasticity to survive in different environments (de Kroons and Hutchings, 1995; Dong, 1995; Kudoh et al., 1999). This plasticity can be used as an indicator of population fitness, stress, and genetic stability as it acts as a buffer against stress (Fazlioglu and Bonser, 2016; Liao et al., 2016). When a plant is exposed to long-term, extreme or multiple constraints during development, it can result in developmental instability, which has been quantified as fluctuating asymmetry (FA) (Rasmuson, 2002; Nikiforou and Manetas, 2017). FA considers the random small deviations of bilateral characters, which depend on the same gene (Kozlov and Zvereva, 2015). Directional asymmetry (e.g. right, R side of the leaf is overall larger than the left side) and antisymmetrical sides (both right and left, L can be larger relative to each other) are defined based on the distribution of the absolute value of FA, which is calculated as FA = |R-L| (Palmer and Strobeck, 1986; Graham et al., 2010; Alves-Silva et al., 2018). The larger the FA absolute value, the more stressed the population is. The developmentally stable population is not constrained by environmental factors or its phenotypic plasticity is efficiently counteracting those and therefore the symmetrical features would be close to ‘perfect symmetry’ (Figure 1) (Velickovic, 2010). Despite the