Evolution of biological populations during and after range expansions
Abstract
During range expansions, an expanding population is necessarily faced with new environmental conditions that require new local adaptations. These may be achieved if there is a sufficient amount of “useful” standing genetic variation in the source population, provided that at least a proportion of this useful variation is brought to new areas by founders. The latter condition may not be met due to, for example, random genetic drift, and so expansion may be halted [1,2]. However, it has been suggested that range expansions may be boosted by plasticity – ability of a single genotype to produce different phenotypes when faced with different environments [3]. Specifically, adaptive plasticity improves the ability of an individual to cope with a new environment, thus effectively weakening natural selection. However, exploiting plasticity induces energetic costs for individuals, and there must also be a limiting range of environmental conditions where a plastic response may be expressed. In turn, this suggests that adaptive plasticity alone is not sufficient to assure successful range expansions, both in terms of the short- and long-term survival and function of a population in a given ecosystem. Instead, expanding populations may also need to evolve some degree of local genetic adaptation [4]. To date, however, we still have poor knowledge and understanding of how local genetic adaptation evolves during range expansions in the face of the joint effect of genetic drift (repeated founder events), selection and plasticity, and how the interplay between these factors may change in the presence of different spatio-temporal dynamics of environmental conditions. Delivering this knowledge is the key aim of this project.
Overall, this project has a potential to deliver new insights into the mechanisms of local adaptation, and to improve our knowledge regarding species’ distributions and re-distributions.
The project will primarily involve mathematical modelling (individual-based computer simulations). This project is partly financed by the Hasselblad Foundation: Grant for Female Scientists to Marina Rafajlović, and by the Swedish Research Council Formas (grant awarded to Kerstin Johannesson and Marina Rafajlović).
References: 1. Polechová, J. 2018. Is the sky the limit? On the expansion threshold of a species’ range. Plos. Biol. 16(6): e2005372. 2. Eriksson, M., and Rafajlović, M. 2021. The effect of the recombination rate between adaptive loci on the capacity of a population to expand its range. Am. Nat. 197: 526-542. 3. Chevin, L.-M., R. Lande, and G. M. Mace. 2010. Adaptation, plasticity, and extinction in a changing environment: towards a predictive theory. PLoS Biol. 8: e1000357. 4. Eriksson, M., and Rafajlović, M. 2022. The role of phenotypic plasticity on the establishment of range margins. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. B 377: 20210012.
