Adapting to extreme environments: hybridisation and the evolution of contemporary heavy metal tolerance

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Climate change, urbanisation and exploitation of natural resources increasingly alter the environment, posingsignificant challenges for plants and animals. For species to adapt to such fast paced change, they will either need todraw on new genetic variation, which is likely to emerge very slowly, or on existing standing variation, which ispotentially very fast. Another possibility is that adaptive alleles will be acquired via hybridisation with closely relatedspecies, facilitating rapid adaptation through the re-use of existing adaptive variation. Repeated evolution of the sameadaptive trait offers unique opportunities to investigate genetic underpinning of rapid adaptation, ultimately informingus about the extent to which evolutionary responses to a changing climate might be predictable.