What it is
Combining space-for-time comparisons, environmental manipulation, and resurrection experiments, the authors studied evolution of the annual plant Lactuca serriola after 44 years of climate change in Israel and the Golan Heights. Contemporary plants flowered over 7 days earlier, a putative adaptation to increasingly warm and dry conditions, and also flowered earlier under experimental drought. However, plants originating from wetter populations flowered earlier than those from drier populations, a mismatch between space-for-time predictions and the shift actually observed over time.
Why it matters
Direct demonstrations of rapid evolution in wild populations tracking ongoing climate change are scarce, and most inferences lean on space-for-time substitutions whose assumptions are hard to verify. Integrating a resurrection experiment that spans the 44 years of actual climatic shift provides direct evidence of evolutionary change rather than an inferred one, and it exposes a case where the spatial gradient across populations predicted the opposite direction to the observed temporal change.
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Filed underSpecies Distribution and Climate Change, Plant and animal studies, Genetic diversity and population structure