ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
The costs and benefits of dispersal in small populations.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolution of species' range and niche in changing environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Simulating Genetic Mixing in Strongly Structured Populations of the Threatened Southern Brown Bandicoot (Evolutionary applications · 2024Article
- Selection for greater dispersal in early life increases rate of age-dependent decline in locomotor activity and shortens lifespan.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2024Article
- Environmental variation and biotic interactions limit adaptation at ecological margins: lessons from rainforestPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Introduction to the theme issue 'Species' ranges in the face of changing environments'.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Understanding the biology of species' ranges: when and how does evolution change the rules of ecological engagement?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Parallel adaptation prompted core-periphery divergence ofFrontiers in plant science · 2022Article
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1 author.
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Abstract
Dispersal has three major effects on adaptation. First, gene flow mixes alleles adapted to different environments, potentially hindering (swamping) adaptation. Second, it brings in other variants and inflates genetic variance: this aids adaptation to spatially (and temporally) varying environments but if selection is hard, it lowers the mean fitness of the population. Third, neighbourhood size, which determines how weak genetic drift is, increases with dispersal-when genetic drift is strong, increase of the neighbourhood size with dispersal aids adaptation. In this note, I focus on the role of dispersal in environments that change gradually across space, and when local populations are quite small such that genetic drift has a significant effect. Using individual-based simulations, I show that in small populations, even leptokurtic dispersal benefits adaptation by reducing the power of genetic drift. This has implications for management of fragmented or marginal populations: the beneficial effect of increased dispersal into small populations is stronger than swamping of adaption under a broad range of conditions, including a mixture of local and long-distance dispersal. However, when environmental gradient is steep, heavily fat-tailed dispersal will swamp continuous adaptation so that only patches of locally adapted subpopulations remain. This article is part of the theme issue 'Species' ranges in the face of changing environments (Part II)'.
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