The genetic architecture and spatiotemporal dynamics of adaptation across human-modified landscapes

Abstract

Understanding the rate and nature of adaptation is crucial for managing biodiversity across our changing landscapes. This perspective synthesizes insights from resistance evolution – a case of rapid, repeated adaptation to extreme human-mediated selection – to reveal how adaptive genetic architectures determine and feedback with evolutionary dynamics. Recent population genomic and quantitative genetic approaches have demonstrated that the extent of genetic parallelism and reliance on de novo vs standing genetic variation can vary with the complexity of genetic architectures. However, we are only starting to understand how spatial and temporal heterogeneity influence the importance of alternative genetic architectures within and among populations, and the pace of adaptation across scales. I outline how the integration of landscape-scale population genomics with high-resolution genomic time series has the potential to transform our understanding of these phenomena. With careful consideration of their limitations, spatiotemporal approaches should prove powerful for reconstructing and predicting the adaptive dynamics of populations across increasingly variable geographic landscapes — from pesticide resistance to climate adaptation.