quantitative trait evolution and environmental change量化特征的进化和环境变化.pdfVIP

Quantitative Trait Evolution and Environmental Change ¨ 1 2 2 3 3 4 Mats Bjorklund *, Esa Ranta , Veijo Kaitala , Lars A. Bach , Per Lundberg , Nils Chr. Stenseth 1 Department of Animal Ecology, Evolutionary Biology Centre (EBC), Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, 2 Integrative Ecology Unit, Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, 3 Department of Theoretical Ecology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden, 4 Centre of Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES), Department of Biology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway Abstract Background: Given the recent changes in climate, there is an urgent need to understand the evolutionary ability of populations to respond to these changes. Methodology/Principal Findings: We performed individual-based simulations with different shapes of the fitness curve, different heritabilities, different levels of density compensation, and different autocorrelation of environmental noise imposed on an environmental trend to study the ability of a population to adapt to changing conditions. The main finding is that when there is a positive autocorrelation of environmental noise, the outcome of the evolutionary process is much more unpredictable compared to when the noise has no autocorrelation. In addition, we found that strong selection resulted in a higher load, and more extinctions, and that this was most pronounced when heritability was low. The level of density-compensation was important in determining the variance in load when there was strong selection, and when genetic variance was lower when the level of density-compensation