Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 Mar;27(6):1181-1195.
doi: 10.1111/gcb.15469. Epub 2020 Dec 20.

Genomic vulnerability to rapid climate warming in a tree species with a long generation time

Benjamin Dauphin  1 , Christian Rellstab  1 , Max Schmid  2 , Stefan Zoller  3 , Dirk N Karger  1 , Sabine Brodbeck  1 , Frédéric Guillaume  2 , Felix Gugerli  1
Affiliations

Genomic vulnerability to rapid climate warming in a tree species with a long generation time

Benjamin Dauphin et al. Glob Chang Biol. 2021 Mar.

Abstract

The ongoing increase in global temperature affects biodiversity, especially in mountain regions where climate change is exacerbated. As sessile, long-lived organisms, trees are especially challenged in terms of adapting to rapid climate change. Here, we show that low rates of allele frequency shifts in Swiss stone pine (Pinus cembra) occurring near the treeline result in high genomic vulnerability to future climate warming, presumably due to the species' long generation time. Using exome sequencing data from adult and juvenile cohorts in the Swiss Alps, we found an average rate of allele frequency shift of 1.23 × 10-2 /generation (i.e. 40 years) at presumably neutral loci, with similar rates for putatively adaptive loci associated with temperature (0.96 × 10-2 /generation) and precipitation (0.91 × 10-2 /generation). These recent shifts were corroborated by forward-in-time simulations at neutral and adaptive loci. Additionally, in juvenile trees at the colonisation front we detected alleles putatively beneficial under a future warmer and drier climate. Notably, the observed past rate of allele frequency shift in temperature-associated loci was decidedly lower than the estimated average rate of 6.29 × 10-2 /generation needed to match a moderate future climate scenario (RCP4.5). Our findings suggest that species with long generation times may have difficulty keeping up with the rapid climate change occurring in high mountain areas and thus are prone to local extinction in their current main elevation range.

Keywords: Allele frequency shift; Alps; climate change; conifer; ecological genomics; genomic offset; local adaptation; risk of non-adaptedness.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

REFERENCES

    1. Aitken, S. N., Yeaman, S., Holliday, J. A., Wang, T., & Curtis-McLane, S. (2008). Adaptation, migration or extirpation: Climate change outcomes for tree populations. Evolutionary Applications, 1(1), 95-111. https://doi.org/10.1002/2016SW001410
    1. Alexander, J. M., Diez, J. M., & Levine, J. M. (2015). Novel competitors shape species’ responses to climate change. Nature, 525(7570), 515-518. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14952
    1. Anandhi, A., Frei, A., Pierson, D. C., Schneiderman, E. M., Zion, M. S., Lounsbury, D., & Matonse, A. H. (2011). Examination of change factor methodologies for climate change impact assessment. Water Resources Research, 47(3), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1029/2010WR009104
    1. Barrett, R. D. H., & Schluter, D. (2008). Adaptation from standing genetic variation. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2007.09.008
    1. Benjamini, Y., & Hochberg, Y. (1995). Controlling the false discovery rate: A practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. Royal Statistical Society, 57(1), 289-300.

LinkOut - more resources