scholarly journals Eco-evolutionary feedbacks and the maintenance of metacommunity diversity in a changing environment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aidan P. Fielding ◽  
Jelena H. Pantel
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Feedback Loop ◽  
Competitive Ability ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Resource Competition ◽  
Landscape Scale ◽  
Phenotypic Evolution ◽  
Species Sorting ◽  
As Species ◽  
Multiple Species

AbstractThe presence and strength of resource competition can influence how organisms adaptively respond to environmental change. Selection may thus reflect a balance between two forces, adaptation to an environmental optimum and evolution to avoid strong competition. While this phenomenon has previously been explored for single communities, its implications for eco-evolutionary dynamics at the metacommunity scale are unknown. We developed a simulation model for the evolution of a quantitative trait that influences both an organism’s carrying capacity and its intra- and interspecific competitive ability. In the model, multiple species inhabit a variable three-patch landscape, and we varied the connectivity level of the species among patches, the presence and pace of directional environmental change, and the strength of competition between the species. Our results reflect some patterns previously observed in evolving metacommunity models, such as species sorting and community monopolization. However species sorting was more likely to occur in evolving communities without dispersal, and monopolization was observed only when environmental change was very rapid. We also detected an eco-evolutionary feedback loop between local phenotypic evolution at one site and competition at another site, which maintains species diversity in some conditions. The existence of a feedback loop maintained by dispersal indicates that eco-evolutionary dynamics in communities operate at a landscape scale.

scholarly journals Eco-Evolutionary Feedbacks and the Maintenance of Metacommunity Diversity in a Changing Environment

Genes ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 1433
Author(s):  
Aidan P. Fielding ◽  
Jelena H. Pantel
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Feedback Loop ◽  
Competitive Ability ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Resource Competition ◽  
Landscape Scale ◽  
Phenotypic Evolution ◽  
Species Sorting ◽  
As Species ◽  
Multiple Species

The presence and strength of resource competition can influence how organisms adaptively respond to environmental change. Selection may thus reflect a balance between two forces, adaptation to an environmental optimum and evolution to avoid strong competition. While this phenomenon has previously been explored in the context of single communities, its implications for eco-evolutionary dynamics at the metacommunity scale are largely unknown. We developed a simulation model for the evolution of a quantitative trait that influences both an organism’s carrying capacity and its intra- and interspecific competitive ability. In the model, multiple species inhabit a three-patch landscape, and we investigated the effect of varying the connectivity level among patches, the presence and pace of directional environmental change, and the strength of competition between the species. Our model produced some patterns previously observed in evolving metacommunity models, such as species sorting and community monopolization. However, we found that species sorting was diminished even at low rates of dispersal and was influenced by competition strength, and that monopolization was observed only when environmental change was very rapid. We also detected an eco-evolutionary feedback loop between local phenotypic evolution at one site and competition at another site, which maintains species diversity in some conditions. The existence of a feedback loop maintained by dispersal indicates that eco-evolutionary dynamics in communities operate at a landscape scale.

scholarly journals Species matter for predicting the functioning of evolving microbial communities

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Giles Barraclough
Keyword(s):  
Microbial Communities ◽  
Resource Use ◽  
Bacterial Communities ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Ecological Interactions ◽  
Community Functioning ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
As Species ◽  
Multiple Species ◽  
Digestive Health

ABSTRACTHumans depend on microbial communities for numerous ecosystem services such as global nutrient cycles, plant growth and their digestive health. Yet predicting dynamics and functioning of these complex systems is hard, making interventions to enhance functioning harder still. One simplifying approach is to assume that functioning can be predicted from the set of enzymes present in a community. Alternatively, ecological and evolutionary dynamics of species, which depend on how enzymes are packaged among species, might be vital for predicting community functioning. I investigate these alternatives by extending classical chemostat models of bacterial growth to multiple species that evolve in their use of chemical resources. Ecological interactions emerge from patterns of resource use, which change as species evolve in their allocation of metabolic enzymes. Measures of community functioning derive in turn from metabolite concentrations and bacterial density. Although the model shows considerable functional redundancy, species packaging does matter by introducing constraints on whether enzyme levels can reach optimum levels for the whole system. Evolution can either promote or reduce functioning compared to purely ecological models, depending on the shape of trade-offs in resource use. The model provides baseline theory for interpreting emerging data on evolution and functioning in real bacterial communities.

Species interactions and contemporary evolution

2019 ◽  
pp. 148-166
Author(s):  
Timothy G. Barraclough
Keyword(s):  
Gene Flow ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Species Interactions ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Contemporary Evolution ◽  
Interacting Species ◽  
As Species ◽  
Species Shift ◽  
Tree Holes ◽  
Strength Of Competition

All organisms live within a diverse assemblage of many other species. Even with strict boundaries to gene flow, species interact in ways that shape their evolutionary dynamics. This chapter outlines how species interactions affect evolution of constituent species within a community. Models of competitive communities illustrate how interactions can constrain evolution, as species shift to occupy new regions with conditions similar to those they were previously adapted to. In contrast, coevolutionary interactions can stimulate evolution and amplify responses to environmental change. Experimental evolution on bacteria isolated from tree-holes formed by the roots of beech trees shows how species adapt to the presence of other species, leading to a decline in the strength of competition. Much more work is needed to investigate these effects in model assemblages of interacting species.

scholarly journals Diversity and evolution of surface polysaccharide synthesis loci in Enterobacteriales

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn E. Holt ◽  
Florent Lassalle ◽  
Kelly L. Wyres ◽  
Ryan Wick ◽  
Rafal J. Mostowy
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Bacterial Species ◽  
Purifying Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Forces ◽  
Polysaccharide Synthesis ◽  
Surface Polysaccharides ◽  
Surface Polysaccharide ◽  
Selective Preservation ◽  
Multiple Species

Bacterial capsules and lipopolysaccharides are diverse surface polysaccharides (SPs) that serve as the frontline for interactions with the outside world. While SPs can evolve rapidly, their diversity and evolutionary dynamics across different taxonomic scales has not been investigated in detail. Here, we focused on the bacterial order Enterobacteriales (including the medically-relevant Enterobacteriaceae), to carry out comparative genomics of two SP locus synthesis regions, cps and kps, using 27,334 genomes from 45 genera. We identified high-quality cps loci in 22 genera and kps in 11 genera, around 4% of which were detected in multiple species. We found SP loci to be highly dynamic genetic entities: their evolution was driven by high rates of horizontal gene transfer (HGT), both of whole loci and component genes, and relaxed purifying selection, yielding large repertoires of SP diversity. In spite of that, we found the presence of (near-)identical locus structures in distant taxonomic backgrounds that could not be explained by recent exchange, pointing to long-term selective preservation of locus structures in some populations. Our results reveal differences in evolutionary dynamics driving SP diversity within different bacterial species, with lineages of Escherichia coli, Enterobacter hormachei and Klebsiella aerogenes most likely to share SP loci via recent exchange; and lineages of Salmonella enterica, Citrobacter sakazakii and Serratia marcescens most likely to share SP loci via other mechanisms such as long-term preservation. Overall, the evolution of SP loci in Enterobacteriales is driven by a range of evolutionary forces and their dynamics and relative importance varies between different species.

scholarly journals Chaos and the (un)predictability of evolution in a changing environment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Artur Rego-Costa ◽  
Florence Débarre ◽  
Luis-Miguel Chevin
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Initial Conditions ◽  
Strong Dependence ◽  
Environmental Stochasticity ◽  
Phenotypic Evolution ◽  
Evolutionary System ◽  
Chaotic Oscillations ◽  
Changing Environment ◽  
Environmental Forcing ◽  
Evolutionary Trajectories

Among the factors that may reduce the predictability of evolution, chaos, characterized by a strong dependence on initial conditions, has received much less attention than randomness due to genetic drift or environmental stochasticity. It was recently shown that chaos in phenotypic evolution arises commonly under frequency-dependent selection caused by competitive interactions mediated by many traits. This result has been used to argue that chaos should often make evolutionary dynamics unpredictable. However, populations also evolve largely in response to external changing environments, and such environmental forcing is likely to influence the outcome of evolution in systems prone to chaos. We investigate how a changing environment causing oscillations of an optimal phenotype interacts with the internal dynamics of an eco-evolutionary system that would be chaotic in a constant environment. We show that strong environmental forcing can improve the predictability of evolution, by reducing the probability of chaos arising, and by dampening the magnitude of chaotic oscillations. In contrast, weak forcing can increase the probability of chaos, but it also causes evolutionary trajectories to track the environment more closely. Overall, our results indicate that, although chaos may occur in evolution, it does not necessarily undermine its predictability.

scholarly journals Perspectives from animal demography on incorporating evolutionary mechanism into plant population dynamics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Paniw
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Natural Populations ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Plant Population ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Phenotypic Traits ◽  
Plant Population Dynamics ◽  
Future Research Agenda ◽  
Powerful Approach

AbstractWith a growing number of long-term, individual-based data on natural populations available, it has become increasingly evident that environmental change affects populations through complex, simultaneously occurring demographic and evolutionary processes. Analyses of population-level responses to environmental change must therefore integrate demography and evolution into one coherent framework. Integral projection models (IPMs), which can relate genetic and phenotypic traits to demographic and population-level processes, offer a powerful approach for such integration. However, a rather artificial divide exists in how plant and animal population ecologists use IPMs. Here, I argue for the integration of the two sub-disciplines, particularly focusing on how plant ecologists can diversify their toolset to investigate selection pressures and eco-evolutionary dynamics in plant population models. I provide an overview of approaches that have applied IPMs for eco-evolutionary studies and discuss a potential future research agenda for plant population ecologists. Given an impending extinction crisis, a holistic look at the interacting processes mediating population persistence under environmental change is urgently needed.

scholarly journals Dynamical analysis of the global elevational diversity gradient in passerine birds reveals a prominent role for highlands as species pumps

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul van Els ◽  
Leonel Herrera-Alsina ◽  
Alex L. Pigot ◽  
Rampal Etienne
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
High Elevation ◽  
Dynamical Analysis ◽  
Reverse Direction ◽  
Passerine Birds ◽  
Diversification Rates ◽  
Diversity Gradient ◽  
As Species ◽  
Almost All

Abstract Low elevation regions harbor the majority of the world’s species diversity compared to high elevation areas. This global elevational diversity gradient, suggests that lowland species have had more time to diversify, or that net diversification rates have been higher in the lowlands (either due to higher ecological limits or intrinsically higher diversification rates). However, highlands seem to be cradles of diversity as they contain many young endemics, suggesting that their rates of speciation are exceptionally fast. Here, we use a phylogenetic diversification model that accounts for the dispersal of species between different elevations to examine the evolutionary dynamics of the elevational diversity gradient in passerine birds, a group that has radiated globally to occupy almost all elevations and latitudes. We find strong support for a model where passerines diversify at the same rate in the highlands and the lowlands but where the rate of dispersal from high to low elevations is more than twice as fast as in the reverse direction. This suggests that while there is no consistent trend in diversification across elevations, highland regions act as species pumps because the diversity they generate migrates into the lowlands, thus setting up the observed gradient in passerine diversity. This species pump is particularly strong in the tropics, where the inferred rate of speciation is 1.4 times faster than in the temperate zone. We conclude that despite their lower diversity, highland regions are disproportionally important for maintaining diversity in the adjacent lowlands. The extinction of species in the tropical highlands due to rapid climate change this century could thus have major and long-lasting impacts on global passerine diversity.

Adaptive Diversification Due to Resource Competition in Asexual Models

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Doebeli
Keyword(s):  
Resource Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Resource Competition ◽  
Single Species ◽  
Character Displacement ◽  
Adaptive Diversification ◽  
Ecological Character ◽  
Ecological Character Displacement ◽  
Phenotypic Diversification ◽  
Established Species

This chapter focuses on evolutionary branching in niche position due to frequency-dependent competition. When the majority phenotype of a population is competing for one type of resource, selection may favor minority phenotypes that consume different types of resources, which could result in phenotypic differentiation and divergence. The idea of divergence due to competition is also the basis for the well-known concept of ecological character displacement, although here the focus is not so much on the origin of diversity arising in a single species, but rather on the evolutionary dynamics of existing diversity between different and already established species. Ecological character displacement embodies the possibility that competition between species can drive divergence in characters determining resource use. However, there are alternative evolutionary scenarios for phenotypic diversification. In the context of resource competition, one such alternative is that individuals diversify their diet by evolving a wider niche.

scholarly journals Evolvability meets biogeography: evolutionary potential decreases at high and low environmental favourability

2017 ◽  
Vol 284 (1856) ◽  
pp. 20170516 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Martínez-Padilla ◽  
A. Estrada ◽  
R. Early ◽  
F. Garcia-Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Morphological Traits ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Environmental Variation ◽  
Phenotypic Traits ◽  
Published Data ◽  
Evolutionary Potential ◽  
Critical Question ◽  
Climate Conditions ◽  
Environmental Selection

Understanding and forecasting the effects of environmental change on wild populations requires knowledge on a critical question: do populations have the ability to evolve in response to that change? However, our knowledge on how evolution works in wild conditions under different environmental circumstances is extremely limited. We investigated how environmental variation influences the evolutionary potential of phenotypic traits. We used published data to collect or calculate 135 estimates of evolvability of morphological traits of European wild bird populations. We characterized the environmental favourability of each population throughout the species' breeding distribution. Our results suggest that the evolutionary potential of morphological traits decreases as environmental favourability becomes high or low. Strong environmental selection pressures and high intra-specific competition may reduce species' evolutionary potential in low- and high- favourability areas, respectively. This suggests that species may be least able to adapt to new climate conditions at their range margins and at the centre. Our results underscore the need to consider the evolutionary potential of populations when studying the drivers of species distributions, particularly when predicting the effects of environmental change. We discuss the utility of integrating evolutionary dynamics into a biogeographical perspective to understand how environmental variation shapes evolutionary patterns. This approach would also produce more reliable predictions about the effect of environmental change on population persistence and therefore on biodiversity.

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