Centre for Infectious Diseases, University of Edinburgh, West Mains Road, EH93JT, UK.
J Theor Biol. 2010 Oct 7;266(3):449-57. doi: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2010.07.014. Epub 2010 Jul 21.
The potential impact of climate change on biodiversity is well documented. A well developed range of statistical methods currently exists that projects the possible future habitat of a species directly from the current climate and a species distribution. However, studies incorporating ecological and evolutionary processes remain limited. Here, we focus on the potential role that local adaptation to climate may play in driving the range dynamics of sessile organisms. Incorporating environmental adaptation into a stochastic simulation yields several new insights. Counter-intuitively, our simulation results suggest that species with broader ranges are not necessarily more robust to climate change. Instead, species with broader ranges can be more susceptible to extinction as locally adapted genotypes are often blocked from range shifting by the presence of cooler adapted genotypes that persist even when their optimum climate has left them behind. Interestingly, our results also suggest that it will not always be the cold-adapted phenotypes that drive polewards range expansion. Instead, range shifts may be driven by phenotypes conferring adaptation to conditions prevalent towards the centre of a species' equilibrium distribution. This may have important consequences for the conservation method termed predictive provenancing. These initial results highlight the potential importance of local adaptation in determining how species will respond to climate change and we argue that this is an area requiring urgent theoretical and empirical attention.
气候变化对生物多样性的潜在影响已有充分记录。目前已经存在一系列成熟的统计方法，可以根据当前气候和物种分布直接预测物种未来可能的栖息地。然而，纳入生态和进化过程的研究仍然有限。在这里，我们专注于局部适应气候可能在驱动固着生物区系动态方面发挥的潜在作用。将环境适应纳入随机模拟会产生一些新的见解。与直觉相反，我们的模拟结果表明，分布范围较广的物种不一定更能适应气候变化。相反，分布范围较广的物种更容易灭绝，因为局部适应的基因型经常被更适应低温的基因型所阻止，即使它们的最适气候已经使它们落后，这些基因型仍然存在。有趣的是，我们的结果还表明，推动极地范围扩张的不一定是适应寒冷的表型。相反，范围转移可能是由赋予对物种平衡分布中心普遍存在的条件的适应的表型驱动的。这可能对被称为预测起源的保护方法产生重要影响。这些初步结果强调了局部适应在确定物种如何应对气候变化方面的潜在重要性，我们认为这是一个需要紧急理论和实证关注的领域。
