Plants in California

California is one of the most diverse places on earth in terms of plant species.Many plants which would have gone extinct elsewhere, thrive in the climate of California. Over 5,500 plant species live in California and over 40% are endemic or occur nowhere else on earth. Previously it was believed that a high speciation rate, or the rate at which new species evolve from old species.This assumption was derived from the high amount of relatively young species in California. When a new species evolves, the species from which it evolved usually dies. Professor Kathleen Kay of University of California-Santa Cruz and Lesley Lancaster of Lund University in Sweden made evolutionary trees of 16 different plant evolution using DNA sequencing. With this data they can accurately estimate the extinction and speciation rates of the certain plants. They speculate that the high diversity is based on the perfect and varying conditions, which allow plants to not become extinct. The study differs with another famous study in the 1970's entitled "Origin and relationships of the California flora." Another cause of speculation is that the climate is like the Mediterranean and it is one of the few non-tropical regions to never be glaciated over or become a desert. 

This connects to Evolution in several ways.The researchers used cladograms to make evolutionary trees, they also used dna sequencing which has to do with molecular genetics. They used fossil records to piece together the evolutionary tree. Also natural selection plays into my article because normally when a new plant species evolves from an old plant species, the old specie becomes extinct, however this is not the case in california.