Spatio-temporal variation in fitness responses to contrasting environments in Arabidopsis thaliana

The evolutionary response of organisms to global climate change is expected to be strongly conditioned by preexisting standing genetic variation. In addition, natural selection imposed by global climate change on fitness-related traits can be heterogeneous over time. We estimated selection of life-h...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Evolution 2018-08, Vol.72 (8), p.1570-1586
Main Authors: Exposito-Alonso, Moises, Brennan, Adrian C., Alonso-Blanco, Carlos, Picó, F. Xavier
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Arabidopsis thaliana
Climate change
Climate change models
Climate models
Conditioning
Evolution
evolutionary experiments
Fitness
Flowering
flowering time
Genetic diversity
global climate change
Heterogeneity
heterogeneous selection
Natural selection
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Phenotypic plasticity
Plant populations
recruitment
Reproductive fitness
survivorship
Temporal variations
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Summary:The evolutionary response of organisms to global climate change is expected to be strongly conditioned by preexisting standing genetic variation. In addition, natural selection imposed by global climate change on fitness-related traits can be heterogeneous over time. We estimated selection of life-history traits of an entire genetic lineage of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana occurring in north-western Iberian Peninsula that were transplanted over multiple years into two environmentally contrasting field sites in southern Spain, as southern environments are expected to move progressively northwards with climate change in the Iberian Peninsula. The results indicated that natural selection on flowering time prevailed over that on recruitment. Selection favored early flowering in six of eight experiments and late flowering in the other two. Such heterogeneity of selection for flowering time might be a powerful mechanism for maintaining genetic diversity in the long run. We also found that north-western A. thaliana accessions from warmer environments exhibited higher fitness and higher phenotypic plasticity for flowering time in southern experimental facilities. Overall, our transplant experiments suggested that north-western Iberian A. thaliana has the means to cope with increasingly warmer environments in the region as predicted by trends in global climate change models.
ISSN:0014-3820
1558-5646
DOI:10.1111/evo.13508