Abstract
Current climate change affects the competitive ability and reproductive success of many species, leading to local extinctions, adjustment to novel local conditions by phenotypic plasticity or rapid adaptation, or tracking their optima through range shifts. However, many species have limited ability to expand to suitable areas. Altitudinal gradients, with abrupt changes in abiotic conditions over short distances, represent “natural experiments” for the evaluation of ecological and evolutionary responses under scenarios of climate change. Nothofagus pumilio is the tree species which dominates as pure stands the montane forests of Patagonia. We evaluated the adaptive value of variation in quantitative traits of N. pumilio under contrasting conditions of the altitudinal gradient with a long-term reciprocal transplant experimental design. While high-elevation plants show little response in plant, leaf, and phenological traits to the experimental trials, low-elevation ones show greater plasticity in their responses to changing environments, particularly at high elevation. Our results suggest a relatively reduced potential for evolutionary adaptation of high-elevation genotypes, and a greater evolutionary potential of low-elevation ones. Under global warming scenarios of forest upslope migration, high-elevation variants may be outperformed by low-elevation ones during this process, leading to the local extinction and/or replacement of these genotypes. These results challenge previous models and predictions expected under global warming for altitudinal gradients, on which the leading edge is considered to be the upper treeline forests.
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Acknowledgments
We are most grateful to M. C. Acosta, G. A. Carrizo, R. Carrizo, S. Diaz, P. Edwards, M. Fasanella, J. Gutierrez, G. Ignazi, and A. E. Rovere, for assistance during fieldwork. We thank various anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments that helped to improve the science and presentation of our manuscript. Administración de Parques Nacionales allowed establishment of the reciprocal transplant experiment within Nahuel Huapi National Park. This work was supported by Agencia de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica PICT 2012-0688, PICT 2013-2404; Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas CONICET PIP 2013-646; and Universidad Nacional del Comahue (04/B157). P. M. and A. C. P. are members of the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET).
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P. M. and A. C. P. contributed equally to this work.
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Communicated by Kouki Hikosaka.
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Mathiasen, P., Premoli, A.C. Living on the edge: adaptive and plastic responses of the tree Nothofagus pumilio to a long-term transplant experiment predict rear-edge upward expansion. Oecologia 181, 607–619 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-016-3568-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-016-3568-7