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Abstract
Filing gaps in our understanding of species' abilities to adapt to novel climates is a key challenge for predicting future range shifts and biodiversity loss. Key knowledge gaps are related to the potential for evolutionary rescue in response to climate, especially in long-lived clonally reproducing species. We illustrate a novel approach to assess the potential for evolutionary rescue using a combination of reciprocal transplant experiment in the field to assess performance under a changing climate and independent growth chamber assays to assess growth- and physiology-related plant trait maxima and plasticities of the same clones. We use a clonal grass, Festuca rubra, as a model species. We propagated individual clones and used them in a transplant experiment across broad-scale temperature and precipitation gradients, simulating the projected direction of climate change in the region. Independent information on trait maxima and plasticities of the same clones was obtained by cultivating them in four growth chambers representing climate extremes. Plant survival was affected by interaction between plant traits and climate change, with both trait plasticities and maxima being important for adaptation to novel climates. Key traits include plasticity in extravaginal ramets, aboveground biomass, and osmotic potential. The direction of selection in response to a given climatic change detected in this study mostly contradicted the natural trait clines indicating that short-term selection pressure as identified here does not match long-term selection outcomes. Long-lived clonal species exposed to different climatic changes are subjected to consistent selection pressures on key traits, a necessary condition for adaptation to novel conditions. This points to evolutionary rescue as an important mechanism for dealing with climate change in these species. Our experimental approach may be applied also in other model systems broadening our understanding of evolutionary rescue. Such knowledge cannot be easily deduced from observing the existing field clines.
Highlights
Evolutionary rescue refers to the ability of a population to adapt to a changing environment from the standing genetic variation (Gomulkiewicz and Holt, 1995; Bell and Collins, 2008; Hufbauer et al, 2015)
The potential for evolutionary rescue detected in the current study provides unique evidence of the ability to maintain genotypes favored under various climatic conditions in clonal species
Conditions to which the plants were shifted affected the survival of transplanted ramets, and the survival success depended on plant traits. This indicates that populations exposed to novel climates can experience directional selection toward optimal traits leading to potential evolutionary rescue
Summary
Evolutionary rescue refers to the ability of a population to adapt to a changing environment from the standing genetic variation (Gomulkiewicz and Holt, 1995; Bell and Collins, 2008; Hufbauer et al, 2015). Evolutionary responses are potentially critical to ensuring population and species persistence under climatic changes of the rates and magnitudes we are seeing today (Diniz et al, 2019). Empirical studies in long-lived species, such as plants, are mostly limited to resurrection experiments (Franks et al, 2008) attainable for annuals with persistent seed bank (Franks et al, 2007; Nevo et al, 2012; Thomann et al, 2015) and comparisons of populations from an inferred identical source exposed for longer periods to novel environments (using, e.g., introduced species, Lustenhouwer et al, 2018), which, do not allow causal understanding of the patterns observed
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