Abstract
There are currently few predictions about when evolutionary processes are likely to play an important role in structuring community features. Determining predictors that indicate when evolution is expected to impact ecological processes in natural landscapes can help researchers identify eco‐evolutionary ‘hotspots', where eco‐evolutionary interactions are more likely to occur. Using data collected from a survey in freshwater cladoceran communities, landscape population genetic data and phenotypic trait data measured in a common garden, we applied a Bayesian linear model to assess whether the impact of local trait evolution in the keystone species Daphnia magna on cladoceran community trait values could be predicted by population genetic properties (within‐population genetic diversity, genetic distance among populations), ecological properties (Simpson's diversity, phenotypic divergence) or environmental divergence. We found that the impact of local trait evolution varied among communities. Moreover, community diversity and phenotypic divergence were found to be better predictors of the contribution of evolution to community trait values than environmental features or genetic properties of the evolving species. Our results thus indicate the importance of ecological context for the impact of evolution on community features. Our study also demonstrates one way to detect signatures of eco‐evolutionary interactions in communities inhabiting heterogeneous landscapes using survey data of contemporary ecological and evolutionary structure.
Highlights
We answer two main questions: 1) to what extent does local evolution of D. magna contribute to among-community variation in life history traits?, and 2) how do landscape, population genetic and community properties influence the role of D. magna evolution for community trait composition? Our study moves beyond demonstrating that evolution can play an important role in structuring communities and instead seeks to identify ways to determine when evolution plays an important role in structuring communities
We evaluated whether |ΔCj| is associated with five potential drivers that vary among our sample sites: D. magna population genetic distance based on neutral molecular markers (DC), withinpopulation genetic diversity (DG), species diversity (DS), the degree of phenotypic divergence, and the environmental divergence of the local patch from the landscape mean (DE) (Box 2)
It remains unclear to what extent evolution impacts ecological processes in complex natural settings and landscapes, and which drivers determine variation in the importance of evolution for ecological processes
Summary
Evolutionary and ecological processes have been shown to dynamically influence one another (Hairston et al 2005, Pelletier et al 2009, Hendry 2017) and there is increasing evidence that evolutionary trait change may explain species composition patterns. These local and regional properties can determine the magnitude of effect this evolutionary change can have on ecological processes. To better understand the drivers of eco-evolutionary dynamics in natural landscapes, it is important to identify the landscape, genetic and ecological features that influence whether evolutionary change has a strong impact on communities
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