BEE: Demographic and evolutionary consequences of phenological tracking

Plants have many ways of determining the environment they experience. This ability to “track” environments alters ecology and evolution. This is because it changes the survival of individuals and determines how the environment exerts natural selection on traits.

Plants can control which environments they are exposed to by adjusting the seasonal timing of development in response to the environment. Specifically, the timing of seed germination determines what a plant is exposed to throughout its life. Understanding how traits like germination timing will respond to changing conditions is important for both agriculture and conservation biology.

This research uses populations that differ in their ability to track seasonal environments via germination cuing, to quantify the degree to which environmental tracking adjustment influence population growth and adaptation. In this way it will provide critical understanding of the influence of a changing environment on important resources. The project will, furthermore, provide societal impacts by training a diverse set of students from k-12 through graduate school.

It will also provide fundamental information to professionals in agriculture and conservation biology.

Environmental tracking is known to be a crucial process that allows organisms to persist under conditions of environmental change and range expansion. This research allows explicit tests of such theory and will elucidate fundamental processes that influence the ability of organisms to persist and adapt under conditions of environmental change. This project uses replicated, genetically variable, populations of similar genetic composition to contrast population persistence, growth, extinction, rates of adaptation, and changes in genetic composition between dormant and non-dormant populations.

The dormancy treatments will be genetically identical with the exception of differences in major genetic loci that control seed dormancy, which allows seasonal environmental tracking. In addition, it will identify specific traits and genetic loci associated with adaptation to contrasting environmental conditions, and to test whether those traits and loci differ depending on the population’s previous ability to track seasonal environmental conditions via germination cuing.

It will elucidate how phenological environmental tracking itself evolves under diverse environmental conditions. This research program therefore tests how ubiquitous processes such as environmental cuing and phenological regulation can alter adaptation across the genome and across the lifecycle, and how they alter population persistence and performance.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.