Environmental fluctuations can promote evolutionary rescue in high-extinction-risk scenarios.

ABSTRACT: Substantial environmental change can force a population onto a path towards extinction, but under some conditions, adaptation by natural selection can rescue the population and allow it to persist. This process, known as evolutionary rescue, is believed to be less likely to occur with greater magnitudes of random environmental fluctuations because environmental variation decreases expected population size, increases variance in population size and increases evolutionary lag. However, previous studies of evolutionary rescue in fluctuating environments have only considered scenarios in which evolutionary rescue was likely to occur. We extend these studies to assess how baseline extinction risk (which we manipulated via changes in the initial population size, degree of environmental change or

SUBMITTER: Peniston JH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7575515 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature