SYMP 1-1
Incorporating rapid evolutionary change into management decision-making: The role of connectivity
Anthropogenic environmental change can alter selective forces and result in rapid evolution on ecological time scales. Such rapid evolution can provide insights into the interaction between ecological and evolutionary dynamics as well as affect management decision-making. Human-induced evolution is often spatially heterogeneous, with populations under stronger anthropogenic selection connected to populations under stronger natural selection. The adaptive role of connectivity can be both inhibitory, by reducing adaptation to local conditions, and constructive, by enhancing local demography and genetic diversity. Through a series of examples, I use models to explore the multi-faceted role of connectivity in understanding how human-induced evolutionary change can affect ecological dynamics and management decisions. The three examples are: (1) marine reserves, which lead to spatial heterogeneity in harvest intensity that changes selection on life history traits, (2) climate change-induced thermal stress on coral reefs, where variation in stress across locations connected by dispersal leads to variable selection on thermal tolerance, and (3) cultivated populations such as hatcheries and aquaculture, which experience domestication selection and can spill over to wild populations. In each case, I establish that evolution alters management expectations and explore the adaptive role of connectivity.
Results/Conclusions
For marine reserves, incorporating evolutionary change in size at maturity increases the potential for reserve to enhance the biomass yield of adjacent fisheries. Connectivity between harvested and protected areas plays a constructive role in harvested areas, where yield benefits increase with increasing dispersal, but a inhibitory role in protected areas, where protection against fisheries-based selection decreases with increasing dispersal. For climate change and coral reefs, incorporating evolutionary change in thermal tolerance indicates a potential for future coral persistence to depend on the rate of climate change that is not observed without evolution. When considering connected reef locations experiencing different levels of stress, the benefit of demographic support and increased genetic diversity outweighs any impediment to local adaptation, such that connectivity enhances persistence. Finally, for cultivation programs, fitness effects of spillover from domesticated populations can have demographic consequences on par with non-genetic impacts. Increased connectivity from the wild population to the cultivated population slows domestication selection and therefore fitness consequences for the wild population. In addition, variable spillover in time decreases the inhibitory role of connectivity in terms of fitness consequences on the wild population. Overall, connectivity plays an increasingly constructive role in adaptation to global change with increasing human impacts.