High-altitude plants defy expectations, showing peak fitness at the range’s edge
A new study in Ecology Letters challenges long-held assumptions about adaptive potential at species’ climate limits. Research on Erythranthe laciniata, a montane plant in the Sierra Nevada, used common garden experiments to test evolutionary hypotheses across its elevational range. Contrary to the rear-leading edge hypothesis, which predicts lower adaptive differentiation at leading edges due to founder effects and limited genetic variation, the study found the highest plant fitness and strongest signals of local adaptation at the high-elevation, leading-edge garden. This result supports the disequilibrium hypothesis, indicating strong potential for climate-driven range expansion and revealing that high-elevation edge populations harbor significant adaptive capacity.
Study Significance: This research directly informs predictive models of species’ responses to climate change by demonstrating that leading-edge populations can be hotspots of adaptive differentiation, not evolutionary dead ends. For evolutionary biologists and conservation planners, these findings underscore the critical importance of prioritizing high-elevation edge populations for genetic conservation and monitoring, as they may hold the key to a species’ evolutionary resilience and capacity for range shift in a warming world.
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