Microevolutionary Response to Climatic Change

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This chapter reviews recent empirical work that has investigated micro-evolutionary response to climate change and discusses potentials and shortcomings of different approaches. In particular, it focuses on the evolutionary response of avian migratory behavior. Birds may very rapidly respond to changing environmental conditions imposed by global climatic change. Although fossil records in other taxa suggest that the most likely response to climatic change is range shift rather than adaptive evolution, the validity of this inference for the current evolutionary response is questionable. Adaptability to temperature changes is likely to have evolved by correlational selection, as a result of environmental fluctuation during the evolutionary history of many bird populations. High levels of genetic variation, favorable genetic correlations, cogradient variation and adaptive plasticity may allow rapid responses to current environmental changes. Moreover, unidirectional gene flow from populations or species better adapted to warmer environmental conditions may further accelerate adaptive evolution. If climate change persists and is accompanied by an increase of climatic variability, then the rate of evolutionary change may be much lower than found in studies on single selection events because of oscillating selection and the erosion of genetic variation. In addition, environmental variation may not be buffered by phenotypic plasticity, or may become maladaptive, which may further accelerate the erosion of genetic variation.

Section snippets

Summary

Organisms may respond to changing environments by evading the new conditions or by adapting to them. Recently, a large body of evidence has been collected indicating that phenotypic adaptation to climate change is widespread. Adaptation may be achieved by phenotypic adjustment or by changes in the genetic composition of populations. Both processes can assure the survival of populations in changing environments, but at different time scales and at different costs. Recent studies indicate that

Microevolutionary Change—Mechanisms and Approaches

Current climatic changes have had, and are persistently having, a profound impact on animal and plant populations (McCarty 2001, Walther et al. 2002, Parmesan and Yohe 2003, Root et al. 2003). The most prominent changes in birds have been changes in the timing of breeding (e.g., Brown et al., 1999; Crick et al., 1997; Dunn, 2004, this volume) and migration (e.g., Tryjanowski et al. 2002, Butler 2003, Hüppop and Hüppop 2003, Jenni and Kéry 2003; Lehikoinen et al., 2004, this volume; Fiedler et al

The Response of Bird Populations to Natural Selection

There is probably no other group of organisms in which the impact of natural selection on trait distribution in natural populations has been studied in more detail than in birds. One reason for this is that the offspring of birds can be easily marked individually and trait distributions and fitness, as measured, for instance, as lifetime reproductive success, can be followed over several generations. Selection studies in natural bird populations have shown that extreme weather events are

Changes in the Level of Genetic Variation

It is not clear how climate change will affect the level of genetic variation in natural populations. To what extent changes are to be expected depends on a number of factors, primarily on the form, strength and constancy of selection, on the size of the population and population trends, and on the degree of isolation, i.e., gene flow (Lacy 1987, Booy et al. 2000). Furthermore, sex ratio and mating system are major determinants of effective populations size (e.g., Frankham 1995b, Nunney 1995).

Adaptive Changes in Laying Date in Response to Climate Change

Probably, the best studied and supported effect of climate change on birds is the trend for earlier egg laying (Winkel and Hudde 1996, Winkel and Hudde 1997, Crick et al. 1997, Crick and Sparks 1999, Brown et al. 1999, Dunn and Winkler 1999, Koike and Higuchi 2002, Sergio 2003, Visser 2003). This trait is known to have a significant heritability in many populations (see Boag and van Noordwijk, 1987), and to respond to selection (Flux and Flux, 1982). But laying date seems also to be a trait

The Adaptability of Migratory Behaviour: The Role of Genetic Variances and Covariances

In the last two decades, a number of studies have demonstrated the presence of moderate to high amounts of additive genetic variation in migratory traits in the laboratory and in the wild. Mean heritabilities for migratory traits obtained under laboratory conditions are in accordance with estimates obtained in the wild (h2=0.40 and 0.45, respectively), and also there is currently no indication that phenotypic variation is lower under controlled laboratory conditions (see review by Pulido and

Conclusions and Outlook

Birds may very rapidly respond to changing environmental conditions imposed by global climatic change. Although fossil records in other taxa suggest that the most likely response to climatic change is range shift rather than adaptive evolution (e.g., Cronin and Schneider 1990, Parmesan et al. 2000), the validity of this inference for the current evolutionary response is questionable (Travis and Futuyma, 1993). Adaptability to temperature changes is likely to have evolved by correlational

Acknowledgements

We thank Timothy Coppack, Anders Møller, and two anonymous reviewers for critically reading the manuscript.

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