title: Evolutionary tipping points in the capacity to adapt to environmental change.
abstract: In an era of rapid climate change, there is a pressing need to understand how organisms will cope with faster and less predictable variation in environmental conditions. Here we develop a unifying model that predicts evolutionary responses to environmentally driven fluctuating selection and use this theoretical framework to explore the potential consequences of altered environmental cycles. We first show that the parameter space determined by different combinations of predictability and timescale of environmental variation is partitioned into distinct regions where a single mode of response (reversible phenotypic plasticity, irreversible phenotypic plasticity, bet-hedging, or adaptive tracking) has a clear selective advantage over all others. We then demonstrate that, although significant environmental changes within these regions can be accommodated by evolution, most changes that involve transitions between regions result in rapid population collapse and often extinction. Thus, the boundaries between response mode regions in our model correspond to evolutionary tipping points, where even minor changes in environmental parameters can have dramatic and disproportionate consequences on population viability. Finally, we discuss how different life histories and genetic architectures may influence the location of tipping points in parameter space and the likelihood of extinction during such transitions. These insights can help identify and address some of the cryptic threats to natural populations that are likely to result from any natural or human-induced change in environmental conditions. They also demonstrate the potential value of evolutionary thinking in the study of global climate change.
authors.affiliation: Initiative for Biological Complexity and the Department of the Interior Southeast Climate Science Center, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695; Department of Biology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130; c.a.botero@email.wustl.edu.
authors.forename: Carlos A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Botero
authors.affiliation: Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Studies, University of Groningen, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands;
authors.forename: Franz J
authors.initials: FJ
authors.lastname: Weissing
authors.affiliation: Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics, Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway; and.
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wright
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027.
authors.forename: Dustin R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Rubenstein
mesh_terms: D000222:Adaptation, Physiological; D005075:Biological Evolution; D004777:Environment; D053476:Extinction, Biological; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D011157:Population Dynamics; D013269:Stochastic Processes; D013997:Time Factors
keywords: adaptive tracking; bet-hedging; fluctuating selection; global change; phenotypic plasticity