Genetic factors predict hybrid formation in the British flora

Abstract

Natural hybridization can have a profound evolutionary impact, with consequences ranging from the extinction of rare taxa to the origin of new species. Natural hybridization is particularly common in plants; however, our understanding of the general factors that promote or prevent hybridization is hampered by the highly variable outcomes in different lineages. Here, we quantify the influence of different predictors on hybrid formation across species from an entire flora. We combine estimates of hybridization with ecological attributes and a new species-level phylogeny for over 1,100 UK flowering plant species. Our results show that genetic factors, particularly parental genetic distance, as well as phylogenetic position and ploidy, are key determinants of hybrid formation, whereas many other factors such as range overlap and genus size explain much less variation in hybrid formation. Overall, intrinsic genetic factors shape the evolutionary and ecological consequences of natural hybridization across species in a flora.