"Incorporating Rapid Evolutionary Change into Management Decision-Making: The Role of Connectivity," by Professor Marissa Baskett, University of California, Davis, presented by the Morrison Institute Winter Colloquium

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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, Professor Baskett uses models to explore the multi-faceted role of connectivity in understanding how human-induced evolutionary change can affect ecological dynamics and management decisions.  First, given marine reserves that introduce spatial heterogeneity in harvest intensity that alters selection on life history traits, 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. Second, for coral adaptation to future climate change where thermal stress varies across locations connected by dispersal, the benefit of demographic support and increased genetic diversity outweighs any impediment to local adaptation, such that connectivity enhances persistence.  Third, for cultivated populations such as hatcheries and aquaculture that experience domestication selection and can spill over to wild populations, 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.

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