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

SUBMITTER: Botero CA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4291647 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature