Evolutionary Responses of Plant Populations to Climate Change

Plant populations exposed to shifting temperature regimes, altered precipitation patterns and elevated atmospheric CO₂ concentrations are undergoing rapid evolutionary change. These changes manifest as phenological shifts, such as earlier leaf-out and flowering, physiological adjustments that enhance water-use efficiency and genetic alterations within populations that bolster survival under local climatic conditions. Responses may be realised through phenotypic plasticity, enabling individual plants to modify trait expression rapidly, or through adaptive evolution arising from heritable variation in traits under selection. The balance between plastic and genetic responses varies with species’ generation time, breeding system and dispersal potential, while gene flow among populations can either facilitate the spread of beneficial alleles or constrain local adaptation. Cutting-edge genomic approaches and resurrection experiments, which compare ancestral and descendant cohorts under common conditions, have begun to disentangle the environmental and genetic components of contemporary evolution. However, the capacity of many plant species to track the pace of climate change remains uncertain, particularly for long-lived perennials and those with limited habitat connectivity. Insights into the mechanisms and limits of evolutionary responses are critical for biodiversity conservation and for devising strategies such as assisted migration, the design of biodiversity corridors and the management of genetic resources in agroecosystems.

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Evolutionary Responses of Plant Populations to Climate Change publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in evolutionary responses of plant populations to climate change across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Phenotypic plasticity: The capacity of an organism to modify its traits in response to environmental variation.

Adaptive evolution: Genetic changes in populations that increase fitness under specific environmental pressures.

Phenology: The timing of seasonal biological events such as leaf-out and flowering.

Intrinsic water-use efficiency: The ratio of carbon assimilation during photosynthesis to water loss through transpiration.

Resurrection approach: An experimental method comparing ancestral and descendant generations revived from stored propagules under common conditions to detect evolutionary change.

References

1. Continuous advance in the onset of vegetation green-up in the Northern Hemisphere, during hiatuses in spring warming. npj Climate and Atmospheric Science (2023).
2. Elevated [CO2] and temperature augment gas exchange and shift the fitness landscape in a montane forb. New Phytologist (2024).
3. Evolutionary and plastic responses to climate change in terrestrial plant populations. Evolutionary Applications (2013).
4. Using the resurrection approach to understand contemporary evolution in changing environments. Evolutionary Applications (2017).
5. Constraints to and conservation implications for climate change adaptation in plants. Conservation Genetics (2015).