What, if anything, can studies of adaptation to altitude reveal about responses to climate change?
Abstract
Understanding the impacts of global climate change on biodiversity is critical to its conservation. Existing frameworks within evolutionary biology can help us predict whether, and under what conditions, adaptation may be a sufficient means for population persistance in a changing environment. Here, we consider the relevance of mountain ranges as natural systems for studying this process. Mountains compress environmental variation into short geographic distances, allowing adaptation across divergent environments to be studied at tractable spatial scales and, importantly, often in the presence of ongoing gene flow between markedly different habitats. We review empirical evidence for local adaptation across elevational gradients and argue that systems of migration-selection balance provide a particularly useful framework for connecting altitude adaptation to rapid climate adaptation. However, the analogy between altitude adaptation and climate adaptation is conditional. Elevation is a composite of temperature, oxygen availability, precipitation, radiation, and other environmental variables, only some of which are relevant to anthropogenic climate change. Moreover, inferring temporal evolutionary responses from spatial differentiation relies on a space-for-time substitution that may not always be valid. We argue that the greatest value of mountain systems therefore lies in using elevational gradients to explore whether responses to spatially varying selection can translate into…
Read the paper
Related studies
- Climate Change Impacts on Marine Ecosystems
- Assisted Gene Flow to Facilitate Local Adaptation to Climate Change
- Climate Change Effects on Plant Disease: Genomes to Ecosystems
- Biodiversity and Climate Change: Integrating Evolutionary and Ecological Responses of Species and Communities
- A systematic review of climate change education: giving children and young people a ‘voice’ and a ‘hand’ in redressing climate change
- Global Monsoon Dynamics and Climate Change
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.