Evolutionary rescue can prevent rate-induced tipping

Abstract

Today, the transformation of ecosystems proceeds at unprecedented rates. Recent studies suggest that high rates of environmental change can cause rate-induced tipping. In ecological models, the associated rate-induced critical transition manifests during transient dynamics in which populations drop to dangerously low densities. In this work, we study how indirect evolutionary rescue - due to the rapid evolution of a predator’s trait - can save a prey population from the rate-induced collapse. Therefore, we explicitly include the time-dependent dynamics of environmental change and evolutionary adaptation in an eco-evolutionary system. We then examine how fast the evolutionary adaptation needs to be to counteract the response to environmental degradation and express this relationship by means of a critical rate. Based on this critical rate, we conclude that indirect evolutionary rescue is more probable if the predator population possesses a high genetic variation and, simultaneously, the environmental change is slow. Hence, our results strongly emphasize that the maintenance of biodiversity requires a deceleration of the anthropogenic degradation of natural habitats.

Rate-induced tipping in ecosystems and climate: the role of unstable states, basin boundaries and transient dynamics

“…It is possible to determine a critical rate of environmental changes beyond which the ecosystem collapses (Siteur et al, 2016;Vanselow et al, 2019). In other ecosystems, it can also happen that a particular species grows to very high abundances, for instance, forming a (possibly harmful) algal bloom (Vanselow et al, 2022b). Such rate-induced critical transitions exist not only in ecosystems but also in physical systems, such as the Greenland ice sheet (Klose et al, 2023).…”