Using the resurrection approach to understand contemporary evolution in changing environments

Abstract

The resurrection approach of reviving ancestors from stored propagules and comparing them with descendants under common conditions has emerged as a powerful method of detecting and characterizing contemporary evolution. As climatic and other environmental conditions continue to change at a rapid pace, this approach is becoming particularly useful for predicting and monitoring evolutionary responses. We evaluate this approach, explain the advantages and limitations, suggest best practices for implementation, review studies in which this approach has been used, and explore how it can be incorporated into conservation and management efforts. We find that although the approach has thus far been used in a limited number of cases, these studies have provided strong evidence for rapid contemporary adaptive evolution in a variety of systems, particularly in response to anthropogenic environmental change, although it is far from clear that evolution will be able to rescue many populations from extinction given current rates of global changes. We also highlight one effort, known as Project Baseline, to create a collection of stored seeds that can take advantage of the resurrection approach to examine evolutionary responses to environmental change over the coming decades. We conclude that the resurrection approach is a useful tool that could be more widely employed to examine basic questions about evolution in natural populations and to assist in the conservation and management of these populations as they face continued environmental change.

Evidence for adaptive responses to historic drought across a native plant species range

“…The finding that there can be a rapid adaptive response to an extreme climate event across the range of a habitat specialist plant contributes to our understanding of plant species distributions and potential persistence under climate change. Resurrecting older genotypes and comparing them to contemporary populations is gaining fast recognition as an important way to empirically test the effects and ramifications of climate change (Franks et al, , ), but few studies have done so. We encourage participation in efforts such as Project Baseline (Etterson et al, ) and other seed bank programs to facilitate further research.…”

Analysing eco‐evolutionary dynamics—The challenging complexity of the real world

“…Such experiments might reveal strong cases of cryptic eco‐evolutionary dynamics. Resurrecting communities for reciprocal transplants . The resurrection ecology approach (Decaestecker et al, ; Franks, Hamann, & Weis, ; Stoks, Govaert, Pauwels, Jansen, & Meester, ; Sultan, Horgan‐Kobelski, Nichols, Riggs, & Waples, ) applied to multiple species simultaneously might provide a powerful way to obtain insight into the impact of evolution as it occurred in nature on ecological processes. Here, again one could test the impact of evolution of every species separately and in combination, and carry out “transplants” over time (Houwenhuyse, Macke, Reyserhove, Bulteel, & Decaestecker, ; Penczykowski et al, 2015), replacing evolved populations by representatives of their ancestors either for the whole community or for each of the member species, and quantify its feedback on ecological processes.…”

“…Here, again one could test the impact of evolution of every species separately and in combination, and carry out “transplants” over time (Houwenhuyse, Macke, Reyserhove, Bulteel, & Decaestecker, ; Penczykowski et al, 2015), replacing evolved populations by representatives of their ancestors either for the whole community or for each of the member species, and quantify its feedback on ecological processes. Resurrection ecology can be applied on layered archives of dormant stages (mainly in aquatic systems, e.g., Stoks et al, ) or when dormant stages have been collected at different moments of a population's history (Franks et al, ). Field transplants with adapted/nonadapted species sets . In field transplant experiments, an interesting avenue might be to carry out “community transplants,” in which entire co‐evolved communities are reciprocally transplanted (Alexander, Diez, & Levine, ) and compared to treatments in which community composition is maintained but in which the populations of all dominant species or a selection of key species is replaced by members of the same species but using genotypes isolated from the other habitat.…”

Thermal evolution offsets the elevated toxicity of a contaminant under warming: A resurrection study in Daphnia magna

“…One powerful approach to investigate evolution is resurrection ecology (Franks, Hamann, & Weis, 2018; Weider, Jeyasingh, & Frisch, 2018). This approach reconstructs microevolution by comparing within a population the phenotypes of organisms hatched from ancestral eggs with those from descendants hatched from more recent eggs (Orsini et al., 2013).…”