Ecological and evolutionary responses of plants to environmental change

植物种群和群落对环境变化的反应涉及生态和进化过程之间的相互作用。了解这些过程是一个基本的科学挑战，并决定了我们预测和管理人类赖以生存的自然生态系统的能力。生物体的特征(例如，它们的大小或开花时间)决定了环境条件如何影响表现。由于这些特征在物种内和物种之间都不同，它们为评估生态进化对环境变化的反应提供了一种自然的通用货币。在物种内部，生物的反应涉及两个过程：表型可塑性，这可以允许开花时间等特征对当地条件做出快速反应(例如，在一个生长季节内)，以及适应性进化，这需要足够的时间出生和死亡导致种群水平的遗传变化。表型可塑性使我们通过时间显式跟踪进化变化的能力变得复杂，而且，不同种群中的塑料反应可以影响那些种群之间的基因流动，从而影响局部适应。这里提出的研究旨在评估这些过程在自然界中的作用，测试关于植物种群相对未被探索的方面和群落对环境变化的反应的关键假说。

The responses of plant populations and communities to environmental change involve interactions between ecological and evolutionary processes.  Understanding these processes presents a fundamental scientific challenge and determines our ability to predict and manage the natural ecosystems upon which people depend.  The traits of organisms (e.g., their size, or time of flowering) determine how environmental conditions influence performance.  Because such traits vary both within and among species, they provide a natural common currency for assessment of eco-evolutionary responses to environmental change.  Within species, organismal responses involve two processes: phenotypic plasticity, which can allow traits such as flowering time to respond rapidly to local conditions (e.g., within a single growing season), and adaptive evolution, which requires sufficient time for birth and death to result in genetic change at the population level.  Phenotypic plasticity complicates our ability to easily track evolutionary change explicitly through time, and moreover, plastic responses in different populations can influence gene flow between those populations, and thus local adaptation.  The research proposed here aims to assess the action of these processes in nature, testing key hypotheses concerning relatively unexplored aspects of plant population and community responses to environmental change.