Real-time (co)evolution in a multitrophic community under current and future climates

Objective

In nature, organisms live in communities and form complex trophic interactions. Understanding how multitrophic communities evolve and respond to environmental changes is a fundamental and pressing challenge in face of global change. While research in evolutionary biology revealed that a warming climate can drive adaptive evolution of individual organisms in the community, studies from community ecology showed that a warming climate can alter trophic interactions and community structure, which in turn changes the (co)evolutionary trajectory of interacting species. Thus, integrating evolutionary and ecological responses is crucial to understand the climate responses of individual species and communities. However, methodological challenges have hampered empirical studies until now.

EvolCommunity will address these challenges by experimentally evolving populations of three interacting species (aphid, duckweed, and daphnia) in their native communities using outdoor mesocosms with different climate conditions. We will quantify how warming shapes the function and evolution of the multitrophic community in real-time. By manipulating climate-driven plant evolution, we will determine whether plant evolution alters the communitys response to climate change. We will also assess whether the interacting species coevolve in the community by quantifying the reciprocal selection imposed from their evolutionary changes. We will investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying (co)evolution using state-of-the-art genetic tools.

Using a combination of experimental evolution, community manipulation, and cutting-edge genetic and analytic tools, EvolCommunity will push the research boundaries of evolutionary ecology by revealing the mechanisms and processes of community evolution at work. The outcomes will open new research avenues in evolutionary ecology by establishing a new methodological framework that integrates evolutionary biology and community ecology in natural communities.