Which individuals will survive?
Observing and recording the devastating impacts of climate change on natural lifeforms has long been a keystone of the climate change ecology field. As a result of years of quality research, we now understand that climate change can reduce species numbers and fitness, cause local extinctions and generally alter where, when, how and with whom organisms live.
From the point of view of biodiversity conservation, things look pretty bad. And modelling predictions suggest that they are likely to remain bad or worsen in the near future, even if we do manage to rapidly rein in our global emissions.
For this reason — although there is still much more to understand about how the various aspects of climate change can impact different organisms and ecosystems — some of the most vital questions arising now relate to if, and how, natural species can persist.
Biological persistence in a changing world relies on an ability to fit or adapt to new conditions, and/or an ability to move to ‘greener pastures’. I was pleased to see work from Andrew Gougherty and colleagues address both climate-change-induced maladaptation and the potential for migration to minimize this maladaptation, in work that focused on a wide-ranging North American tree species, balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera)9.
Importantly, the authors did not assess the adaptive capacity of the species as a whole, but instead investigated vulnerability in the context of 81 balsam polar populations spanning North America, thus incorporating intraspecific (within species) variation that may play an important role in persistence potential. In the study, maladaptation was defined based on gene–environment associations, in this case centred on flowering-time genes, which are crucial in regulating plant seasonal growth, dormancy and reproduction. Understanding the genetic variations that underlie fitness under given environmental conditions may help understand and rapidly identify individuals with the best chances of survival under climate change.
The Gougherty study uses modern methods to go beyond species-level modelling and, to understand population risks in the context of maladaptation and migration, under climate change. This, in turn, can be utilized to prioritize conservation efforts. Ultimately, we hope that climate change science cannot just observe and understand the human-caused alterations to our planet, but lead us to prevent, manage and save.
Tegan Armarego-Marriott has been an editor at Nature Climate Change since 2019.
Source: Ecology - nature.com
