Adaptation, Plasticity, and Extinction in a Changing Environment Towards a Predictive Theory 英文参考文献.docVIP

Essay Adaptation,Plasticity,andExtinctioninaChanging Environment:TowardsaPredictiveTheory Luis-MiguelChevin1*,RussellLande1,GeorginaM.Mace2 1DivisionofBiology,ImperialCollegeLondon,SilwoodPark,UnitedKingdom,2CentreforPopulationBiology,ImperialCollegeLondon,SilwoodPark,UnitedKingdom Summary space,andmustthereforeadaptinsituto avoid extinction. What determines the maximum rate of environmental change that populations can cope with? Under- standingthiswillinformbothmodelsand management plans about where critical thresholds lie or what might affect the potentialresilienceofparticularspeciesor ecologicalcommunities. drawback is that it does not account for the biological processes underlying adap- tation of a species to its environment. It cannot identifyorincorporatethebiolog- ical differences among species that deter- mine whether or not they can persist in situ. Whilea newgeneration of‘‘process- based’’(or‘‘mechanistic’’)nichemodelsis being developed to overcome these limi- tations [9–11], they currently rely on Many species are experiencing sus- tained environmental change mainly due tohumanactivities.Theunusualrateand extent of anthropogenic alterations of the environment may exceed the capacity of developmental, genetic,anddemographic mechanismsthatpopulationshaveevolved to deal with environmental change. To begin to understand the limits to popula- tion persistence, we present a simple evolutionary modelforthecriticalrate of environmental change beyond which a population must decline and go extinct. We usethis modeltohighlight themajor Twomainapproachesexistforstudying the impact of environmental change on species persistence—niche modelling and mechanisticpopulationmodelling.Onthe one hand, ‘‘climate envelope models’’ (or ‘‘niche models’’) are correlative and fo- cusedontheenvironment.Theirconcep- tual background traces to Hutchinson’s multidimensional representation of the niche [2]. They use measurements of environmental variables and records of speci