ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Limits to adaptation along environmental gradients.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 69 papers.
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Who cites it
69 citing papers in PubMed.
- Genetically diverse populations hold the keys to climatic adaptation in the Western barn owl (Tyto alba).Communications biology · 2026Article
- Environmental "knees" and "wiggles" as strong stabilizers of species' range limits set by interspecific competition.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Evolution of species' range and niche in changing environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Environment heterogeneity creates fast amplifiers of natural selection in graph-structured populations.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Strong amplification of quantitative genetic variation under a balance between mutation and fluctuating stabilizing selection.Genetics · 2026Article
- When South Meets North: A Joint Contact Zone Coinciding With Environmental Gradients in Three Boreal Tree Species.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Rapid adaptation and extinction in synchronized outdoor evolution experiments ofScience (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Historical contingency limits adaptive diversification in a spatially structured environment.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- Strong Bottlenecks Constrain Adaptive Coevolution in a Host-Parasite Metapopulation.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- De Novo Transcriptome Assembly and Annotation Elucidate the Response to Extreme Temperature Stress in the Intermediate HostInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Extreme genetic signatures of local adaptation in a notorious rice pest,National science review · 2025Article
- Evolutionary adaptation under climate change:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Impacts of limits to adaptation on population and community persistence in a changing environment.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The structure of the environment influences the patterns and genetics of local adaptation.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- Evolutionary adaptation under climate change:bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Ecological trade-offs drive phenotypic and genetic differentiation of Arabidopsis thaliana in Europe.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Adaptive colonization across a parasitism-mutualism gradient.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- Genotype-by-environment interactions and local adaptation shape selection in the US National Chip Processing Trial.TAG. Theoretical and applied genetics. Theoretische und angewandte Genetik · 2024Article
- Phylogeography and phenotypic wing shape variation in a damselfly across populations in Europe.BMC ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Divergence in evolutionary potential of life history traits among wild populations is predicted by differences in climatic conditions.Evolution letters · 2024Article
9 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Why do species not adapt to ever-wider ranges of conditions, gradually expanding their ecological niche and geographic range? Gene flow across environments has two conflicting effects: although it increases genetic variation, which is a prerequisite for adaptation, gene flow may swamp adaptation to local conditions. In 1956, Haldane proposed that, when the environment varies across space, "swamping" by gene flow creates a positive feedback between low population size and maladaptation, leading to a sharp range margin. However, current deterministic theory shows that, when variance can evolve, there is no such limit. Using simple analytical tools and simulations, we show that genetic drift can generate a sharp margin to a species' range, by reducing genetic variance below the level needed for adaptation to spatially variable conditions. Aided by separation of ecological and evolutionary timescales, the identified effective dimensionless parameters reveal a simple threshold that predicts when adaptation at the range margin fails. Two observable parameters determine the threshold: (i) the effective environmental gradient, which can be measured by the loss of fitness due to dispersal to a different environment; and (ii) the efficacy of selection relative to genetic drift. The theory predicts sharp range margins even in the absence of abrupt changes in the environment. Furthermore, it implies that gradual worsening of conditions across a species' habitat may lead to a sudden range fragmentation, when adaptation to a wide span of conditions within a single species becomes impossible.
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