A Meta-Analysis of Local Adaptation in Plants

By Roosa Leimu, M. Fischer. PLoS ONE, 2008

1,083 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Local adaptation is of fundamental importance in evolutionary, population, conservation, and global-change biology. The generality of local adaptation in plants and whether and how it is influenced by specific species, population and habitat characteristics have, however, not been quantitatively reviewed. Therefore, we examined published data on the outcomes of reciprocal transplant experiments using two approaches. We conducted a meta-analysis to compare the performance of local and foreign plants at all transplant sites. In addition, we analysed frequencies of pairs of plant origin to examine whether local plants perform better than foreign plants at both compared transplant sites. In both approaches, we also examined the effects of population size, and of the habitat and species characteristics that are predicted to affect local adaptation. We show that, overall, local plants performed significantly better than foreign plants at their site of origin: this was found to be the case in 71.0% of the studied sites. However, local plants performed better than foreign plants at both sites of a pair-wise comparison (strict definition of local adaption) only in 45.3% of the 1032 compared population pairs. Furthermore, we found local adaptation much more common for large plant populations (>1000 flowering individuals) than for small populations (<1000 flowering individuals) for which local adaptation was very rare. The degree of local adaptation was independent of plant life history, spatial or temporal habitat heterogeneity, and geographic scale. Our results suggest that local adaptation is less common in plant populations than generally assumed. Moreover, our findings reinforce the fundamental importance of population size for evolutionary theory. The clear role of population size for the ability to evolve local adaptation raises considerable doubt on the ability of small plant populations to cope with changing environments.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e14131ad325eb62b8555dee084f7c6e8cfa2ba77

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Citations in the corpus

Latitudinal gradients as natural laboratories to infer species' responses to temperature (2013, background): “…– at least within these study species – the importance of directional selection and adaptation to local environmental factors (Kawecki & Ebert 2004; Leimu & Fischer 2008; Montesinos-Navarro et al. 2011) which might affect the ability of these plant populations to respond to future climate…”
Climate and competition effects on tree growth in Rocky Mountain forests (2017, background): “The reciprocal transplant literature indicates that differentiated responses to climate and other environmental conditions is common in plant taxa generally (Leimu & Fischer 2008).”
Predicting the Probability of Outbreeding Depression (2011, background): “Empirical evidence confirms the roles of these variables in determining genetic adaptation (Frankham 2008; Leimu & Fischer 2008).”
Forests and global change: what can genetics contribute to the major forest management and policy challenges of the twenty-first century? (2016, background): “Leading edge peripheral (as well as numerous small) populations in northern Europe do not always demonstrate local genetic adaptation (Leimu and Fischer 2008).”
The effects of phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation on forecasts of species range shifts under climate change. (2014, background): “Since then, numerous examples of such within-species differentiation have been published and attention has more recently turned to the question of under what circumstances local adaptation is likely to evolve (Kawecki & Ebert 2004; Savolainen et al. 2007; Leimu & Fischer 2008; Ara ujo et al. 2013).”
Ecological genomics meets community-level modelling of biodiversity: mapping the genomic landscape of current and future environmental adaptation. (2015, background): “…level, in reality local adaptation of different populations is common among many plants and animals (Kawecki & Ebert 2004; Savolainen et al. 2007; Leimu & Fischer 2008), and intraspecific variation in climatic tolerances and local adaptation has been documented for many physiological and…”
Evolutionary changes in plant reproductive traits following habitat fragmentation and their consequences for population fitness (2012, background): “If the genetic variation that is lost codes for phenotypic variation, habitat fragmentation may impede adaptive responses (Stockwell, Hendry & Kinnison 2003; Leimu & Fischer 2008).”
Local adaptation in marine invertebrates. (2011, background): “An additional spatial pattern of interest concerns the extent to which local adaptation is universal across all populations of a species versus being restricted to a subset of populations (Leimu & Fischer 2008, Hereford 2009).”
Climate change, genetic markers and species distribution modelling (2015, positive): “But there is abundant evidence that, across their geographical ranges, many species are organized into differentiated genetic lineages that may be adapted to local conditions (Linhart & Grant, 1996; Leimu & Fischer, 2008; Hereford, 2009).”
Potential for evolutionary responses to climate change – evidence from tree populations (2013, background): “A review by Leimu & Fischer (2008) found that in plants only about 50% of all population pairs in reciprocal transplantations studies showed evidence of local adaptation, i.e., each population at its native site had higher fitness than other populations introduced to that site.”
Mix and match: regional admixture provenancing strikes a balance among different seed-sourcing strategies for ecological restoration (2018, neutral): “Although older meta-analyses of local adaptation did not reveal relationship between geographic distance and strength of local adaptation (Leimu and Fischer 2008), a number of recent, well-designed studies found regional adaptation, i.e. a geographically broader analogue of local adaptation for…”
Eco‐evolutionary dynamics in fragmented landscapes (2017, neutral): “A meta-analysis of patterns of local adaptation in plants found that local populations of small size ( 100) were unlikely to show any local adaptation (Leimu and Fischer 2008).”
Genetic differentiation and regional adaptation among seed origins used for grassland restoration: lessons from a multispecies transplant experiment (2017, methodology): “A meta-analysis of local adaptation studies showed that there was evidence of local adaptation in about half of them (Leimu & Fischer 2008).”
Invasive plant species are locally adapted just as frequently and at least as strongly as native plant species (2016, methodology): “On the other hand, self-incompatibility may enhance evolution of local adaptation through an increase in genetic variation within populations (Leimu & Fischer 2008; Hereford 2010).”
What Seeds to Plant in the Great Basin? Comparing Traits Prioritized in Native Plant Cultivars and Releases with those that Promote Survival in the Field (2015, background): “As local adaptation is common in plants (Joshi et al. 2001; Leimu and Fischer 2008), seeded species should originate from areas with similar environmental conditions, following empirical seed zones (e.g., Johnson et al. 2012; Johnson et al. 2013) or generalized seed zones (e.g. Bower et al. 2014)…”