TY - JOUR
T1 - Climate relicts and their associated communities as natural ecology and evolution laboratories
AU - Woolbright, Scott A.
AU - Whitham, Thomas G.
AU - Gehring, Catherine A.
AU - Allan, Gerard J.
AU - Bailey, Joseph K.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the Northern Arizona University (NAU) Cottonwood and Pinyon Ecology Laboratories for their helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Thomas Harrington and Larry Peterson who graciously provided photographs, and Paul Keim, Phil Service, and Tom Sisk for valuable discussions. Finally, we thank Paul Craze, the staff at TREE , and the two independent reviewers who assisted us with this manuscript. Financial support was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Frontiers in Integrative Biological Research (FIBR), Macrosystems and Major Research Instrumentation support for the Southwest Experimental Garden Array and by the postdoctoral Fellows program at the University of Illinois Institute for Genomic Biology.
PY - 2014/7
Y1 - 2014/7
N2 - Climate relicts, marginal populations that have become isolated via climate-driven range shifts, preserve ecological and evolutionary histories that can span millennia. Studies point to climate relicts as 'natural laboratories' for investigating how long-term environmental change impacts species and populations. However, we propose that such research should be expanded to reveal how climate change affects 'interacting' species in ways that reshape community composition and evolution. Biotic interactions and their community and ecosystem effects are often genetically based and driven by associations with foundation species. We discuss evolution in climate relicts within the context of the emerging fields of community and ecosystem genetics, exploring the idea that foundation relicts are also natural community and ecosystem laboratories and windows to future landscapes.
AB - Climate relicts, marginal populations that have become isolated via climate-driven range shifts, preserve ecological and evolutionary histories that can span millennia. Studies point to climate relicts as 'natural laboratories' for investigating how long-term environmental change impacts species and populations. However, we propose that such research should be expanded to reveal how climate change affects 'interacting' species in ways that reshape community composition and evolution. Biotic interactions and their community and ecosystem effects are often genetically based and driven by associations with foundation species. We discuss evolution in climate relicts within the context of the emerging fields of community and ecosystem genetics, exploring the idea that foundation relicts are also natural community and ecosystem laboratories and windows to future landscapes.
KW - Climate relict
KW - Community and ecosystem genetics
KW - Community ecology and evolution
KW - Foundation species
KW - Natural laboratories
KW - Species interactions
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U2 - 10.1016/j.tree.2014.05.003
DO - 10.1016/j.tree.2014.05.003
M3 - Review article
C2 - 24932850
AN - SCOPUS:84903646677
SN - 0169-5347
VL - 29
SP - 406
EP - 416
JO - Trends in Ecology and Evolution
JF - Trends in Ecology and Evolution
IS - 7
ER -