The response of populations and species to changing conditions determines how community composition will change functionally, including via trait shifts. Selection from standing variation has been suggested to be more efficient than acquiring new mutations. Yet, studies on community trait composition and trait selection largely focus on phenotypic variation in ecological traits, whereas the underlying genomic traits remain understudied. Using a genome-explicit, niche- and individual-based model, we address the potential interactions between genomic and ecological traits shaping communities under an environmental selective forcing, namely temporal positively autocorrelated environmental fluctuation. In this model, all ecological traits are explicitly coded by the genome. For our experiments, we initialized 90 replicate communities, each with ca 350 initial species, characterized by random genomic and ecological trait combinations, on a 2D spatially explicit landscape with two orthogonal gradients (temperature and resource use). We exposed each community to two contrasting scenarios: without (i.e. static environments) and with temporal variation. We then analyzed emerging compositions of both genomic and ecological traits at the community, population and genomic levels. Communities in variable environments were species poorer than in static environments, and populations more abundant, whereas genomes had lower genetic linkage, mean genetic variation and a non-significant tendency towards higher numbers of genes. The surviving genomes (i.e. those selected by variable environments) coded for enhanced environmental tolerance and smaller biomass, which resulted in faster life cycles and thus also in increased potential for evolutionary rescue. Under temporal environmental variation, larger, less linked genomes retained more variation in mean dispersal ability at the population level than at genomic level, whereas the opposite trend emerged for biomass. Our results provide clues to how sexually-reproducing diploid plant communities might react to variable environments and highlights the importance of genomic traits and their interaction with ecological traits for eco-evolutionary responses to changing climates.

中文翻译：

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时间环境变化可能对基因组和生态特征施加差异选择

种群和物种对不断变化的条件的反应决定了群落组成将如何在功能上发生变化，包括通过性状转变。从常备变异中进行选择被认为比获得新的突变更有效。然而，对群落性状组成和性状选择的研究主要集中在生态性状的表型变异上，而潜在的基因组性状仍未得到充分研究。使用基因组显式、基于生态位和基于个体的模型，我们解决了在环境选择性强迫下塑造群落的基因组和生态特征之间的潜在相互作用，即时间正自相关的环境波动。在这个模型中，所有生态特征都由基因组明确编码。对于我们的实验，我们初始化了 90 个复制社区，每个都有大约 350 个初始物种，以随机基因组和生态特征组合为特征，在具有两个正交梯度（温度和资源使用）的 2D 空间明确景观上。我们将每个社区暴露在两种截然不同的场景中：没有（即静态环境）和有时间变化。然后，我们在群落、种群和基因组水平上分析了基因组和生态特征的新兴组成。可变环境中的群落物种比静态环境中的物种更贫乏，种群更丰富，而基因组具有较低的遗传联系，平均遗传变异和不显着的基因数量增加趋势。幸存的基因组（即由可变环境选择的基因组）编码为增强的环境耐受性和较小的生物量，这导致了更快的生命周期，从而也增加了进化拯救的潜力。在时间环境变化下，较大的、联系较少的基因组在种群水平上保留了比基因组水平上更多的平均扩散能力变化，而生物量则出现相反的趋势。我们的研究结果为有性繁殖二倍体植物群落如何对可变环境做出反应提供了线索，并强调了基因组特征及其与生态特征相互作用对气候变化的生态进化反应的重要性。