Transgenerational and within-generation plasticity in response to climate change: Insights from a manipulative field experiment across an elevational gradient

Abstract

Parental environmental effects—or transgenerational plasticity—can influence an individual’s phenotype or fitness yet remain underexplored in the context of global change. Using the perennial self-pollinating plant Boechera stricta, we explored the effects of climate change on transgenerational and within-generation plasticity in dormancy, germination, growth, and survival. We first conducted a snow removal experiment in the field, in which we transplanted 16 families of known origin into three common gardens at different elevations and exposed half of the siblings to contemporary snow dynamics and half to early snow removal. We planted the offspring of these individuals in a factorial manipulation of temperature and water level in the growth chamber and reciprocally transplanted them across all parental environments in the field. The growth chamber experiment revealed that the effects of transgenerational plasticity persist in traits expressed after establishment, even when accounting for parental effects on seed mass. The field experiment showed that transgenerational and within-generation plasticity can interact and that plasticity varies clinally in populations distributed across elevations. These findings demonstrate that transgenerational plasticity can influence fitness-related traits and should be incorporated in studies of biological responses to climate change.