The Effects of Weather on Avian Growth and Implications for Adaptation to Climate Change

Climate change is forecasted to generate a range of evolutionary changes and plastic responses. One important aspect of avian responses to climate change is how weather conditions may change nestling growth and development. Early life growth is sensitive to environmental effects and can potentially have long-lasting effects on adult phenotypes and fitness. A detailed understanding of both how and when weather conditions affect the entire growth trajectory of a nestling may help predict population changes in phenotypes and demography under climate change. This review covers three main topics on the impacts of weather variation (air temperature, rainfall, wind speed, solar radiation) on nestling growth. Firstly, we highlight why understanding the effects of weather on nestling growth might be important in understanding adaptation to, and population persistence in, environments altered by climate change. Secondly, we review the documented effects of weather variation on nestling growth curves. We investigate both altricial and precocial species, but we find a limited number of studies on precocial species in the wild. Increasing temperatures and rainfall have mixed effects on nestling growth, while increasing windspeeds tend to have negative impacts on the growth rate of open cup nesting species. Thirdly, we discuss how weather variation might affect the evolution of nestling growth traits and suggest that more estimates of the inheritance of and selection acting on growth traits in natural settings are needed to make evolutionary predictions. We suggest that predictions will be improved by considering concurrently changing selection pressures like urbanization. The importance of adaptive plastic or evolutionary changes in growth may depend on where a species or population is located geographically and the species’ life-history. Detailed characterization of the effects of weather on growth patterns will help answer whether variation in avian growth frequently plays a role in adaption to climate change.

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Adaptation to climate change through genetic accommodation and assimilation of plastic phenotypes

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rstb.2018.0176 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 374 (1768) ◽

pp. 20180176 ◽

Cited By ~ 61

Author(s):

Morgan Kelly

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Natural Populations ◽

Adaptive Responses ◽

Adaptation To Climate Change ◽

Genetic Accommodation ◽

Direct Observations ◽

Climate Change Responses ◽

Evolutionary Changes ◽

Environmentally Responsive

Theory suggests that evolutionary changes in phenotypic plasticity could either hinder or facilitate evolutionary rescue in a changing climate. Nevertheless, the actual role of evolving plasticity in the responses of natural populations to climate change remains unresolved. Direct observations of evolutionary change in nature are rare, making it difficult to assess the relative contributions of changes in trait means versus changes in plasticity to climate change responses. To address this gap, this review explores several proxies that can be used to understand evolving plasticity in the context of climate change, including space for time substitutions, experimental evolution and tests for genomic divergence at environmentally responsive loci. Comparisons among populations indicate a prominent role for divergence in environmentally responsive traits in local adaptation to climatic gradients. Moreover, genomic comparisons among such populations have identified pervasive divergence in the regulatory regions of environmentally responsive loci. Taken together, these lines of evidence suggest that divergence in plasticity plays a prominent role in adaptation to climatic gradients over space, indicating that evolving plasticity is also likely to play a key role in adaptive responses to climate change through time. This suggests that genetic variation in plastic responses to the environment (G × E) might be an important predictor of species' vulnerabilities to climate-driven decline or extinction.This article is part of the theme issue ‘The role of plasticity in phenotypic adaptation to rapid environmental change’.

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A Comparative Analysis of Initiatives and Adaptation Measures To Climate Change Undertaken in Poland and Eastern EU Countries

Comparative Economic Research ◽

10.1515/cer-2017-0022 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 20 (3) ◽

pp. 95-115

Author(s):

Dorota Michalak

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Western Europe ◽

Agricultural Sector ◽

Life Support ◽

Weather Conditions ◽

Eastern European ◽

Adaptation To Climate Change ◽

Adaptation Measures ◽

Negative Impacts ◽

Impacts Of Climate Change

Climate change is one of the greatest contemporary threats to our planet’s environmental, social and economic condition. It is accompanied by massive changes in life support systems on Earth, where its far‑reaching effects will be felt in the upcoming decades. The development of a national adaptation policy (strategy and/or plan) serves as an instrument that provides the necessary framework for adaptation by coordinating the consideration of climate change across relevant sectors, geographical scales, and levels of decision making. The purpose of this paper is to compare the degree of influence of climate change on the economy of the Eastern European Union and compare national strategies for adaptation to climate change in selected countries of Western Europe and Poland. The study shows that countries bearing the brunt of the negative impacts of climate change are Cyprus, Malta, Bulgaria and Poland. These countries recorded the highest climate change index, the greatest losses in terms of estimated GDP, household welfare, land losses, and lower incomes in the agricultural and tourism sectors. With appropriate adaptation measures, countries such as Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia can take advantage of the future changes in weather conditions. A shift in the productivity of the agricultural sector and tourism from south to north can be noted.

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Vector Borne Diseases and Climate Change

Advances in Environmental Engineering and Green Technologies - Handbook of Research on Global Environmental Changes and Human Health ◽

10.4018/978-1-5225-7775-1.ch017 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 349-358

Author(s):

Kholoud Kahime ◽

Moulay Abdelmonaim El Hidan ◽

Denis Sereno ◽

Bounoua Lahouari ◽

Ahmed Karmaoui ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Disease Transmission ◽

Weather Conditions ◽

Extreme Weather Events ◽

Adaptation To Climate Change ◽

Intergovernmental Panel ◽

Vector Borne Diseases ◽

Weather Events ◽

Vector Borne ◽

Increasing Risk

The incidence of emergence diseases including vector borne diseases, water diseases, and some physiologic impairment is considered sensitive to climate. Malaria, leishmaniasis, dengue, and viral encephalitis are among those diseases most influenced by climate. Variation in the incidence of vector borne diseases is associated with extreme weather events and annual changes in weather conditions. Africa in general and Morocco in particular are designated as an area of significant impact by numerous the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and notably susceptible to such drastic climate-related health consequences. Climatic parameter change would directly affect disease transmission by acting on the vector's geographic range, activity, or reproduction and by reduction the period of pathogen incubation. This chapter will discuss the increasing risk of some vector-borne diseases in hazard-prone localities. It further identifies the severe challenges both of health adaptation to climate change by highlighting Moroccan adaptive capacity to such crises.

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Genetic differentiation in functional traits among European sessile oak populations

Tree Physiology ◽

10.1093/treephys/tpz090 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 39 (10) ◽

pp. 1736-1749 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

José M Torres-Ruiz ◽

Antoine Kremer ◽

Madeline R Carins Murphy ◽

Tim Brodribb ◽

Laurent J Lamarque ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Genetic Differentiation ◽

Adaptive Capacity ◽

Growth Traits ◽

Common Garden ◽

Quercus Petraea ◽

Climatic Conditions ◽

Adaptation To Climate Change ◽

Path Analyses ◽

Trait Associations

Abstract The vulnerability of forest species and tree populations to climate change is related to the exposure of the ecosystem to extreme climatic conditions and to the adaptive capacity of the population to cope with those conditions. Adaptive capacity is a relatively under-researched topic within the forest science community, and there is an urgent need to understand to what extent particular combinations of traits have been shaped by natural selection under climatic gradients, potentially resulting in adaptive multi-trait associations. Thus, our aim was to quantify genetic variation in several leaf and woody traits that may contribute to multi-trait associations in which intra-specific variation could represent a source for species adaptation to climate change. A multi-trait approach was performed using nine Quercus petraea provenances originating from different locations that cover most of the species’ distribution range over Europe and that were grown in a common garden. Multiple adaptive differences were observed between oak provenances but also some evolutionary stasis. In addition, our results revealed higher genetic differentiation in traits related to phenology and growth than in those related to xylem anatomy, physiology and hydraulics, for which no genetic differentiation was observed. The multiple associations between those traits and climate variables resulting from multivariate and path analyses suggest a multi-trait association largely involving phenological and growth traits for Q. petraea.

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