Modeling Adaptive and Nonadaptive Responses of Populations to Environmental Change.

Tim Coulson,Bruce E Kendall,Jean-Michel Gaillard,Susanne Schindler,Arpat Ozgul,Floriane Plard,Julia Barthold

doi:10.1086/692542

Abstract

Understanding how the natural world will be impacted by environmental change over the coming decades is one of the most pressing challenges facing humanity. Addressing this challenge is difficult because environmental change can generate both population-level plastic and evolutionary responses, with plastic responses being either adaptive or nonadaptive. We develop an approach that links quantitative genetic theory with data-driven structured models to allow prediction of population responses to environmental change via plasticity and adaptive evolution. After introducing general new theory, we construct a number of example models to demonstrate that evolutionary responses to environmental change over the short-term will be considerably slower than plastic responses and that the rate of adaptive evolution to a new environment depends on whether plastic responses are adaptive or nonadaptive. Parameterization of the models we develop requires information on genetic and phenotypic variation and demography that will not always be available, meaning that simpler models will often be required to predict responses to environmental change. We consequently develop a method to examine whether the full machinery of the evolutionarily explicit models we develop will be needed to predict responses to environmental change or whether simpler nonevolutionary models that are now widely constructed may be sufficient.

Highlights

Ecosystems—from the deep ocean to the high arctic, from deserts to tropical forests—are responding to environmental change
After introducing general new theory, we construct a number of example models to demonstrate that evolutionary responses to environmental change over the short-term will be considerably slower than plastic responses and that the rate of adaptive evolution to a new environment depends on whether plastic responses are adaptive or nonadaptive
We introduce a new general approach combining insights from structured population modeling and evolutionary genetics that allows us to examine how adaptive evolution and plasticity contribute to the way that populations—and, the ecosystems in which they are embedded—respond to environmental change

Summary

Introduction

Ecosystems—from the deep ocean to the high arctic, from deserts to tropical forests—are responding to environmental change Understanding and predicting these responses is one of the most pressing issues currently facing humanity. The dynamics of phenotypic trait distributions are determined by differential birth, death, development, and inheritance rates across phenotypic trait values, where inheritance is defined in the broad sense as the map between parental and offspring phenotypes (Easterling et al 2000; Rees et al 2014). Given these links between different levels of biological organization, there can be a cascading

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