Anthropogenic environmental change can underpin major shifts in natural selective regimes, and can thus alter the evolutionary trajectories of wild populations. However, little is known about the evolutionary impacts of deforestation—one of the most pervasive human-driven changes to terrestrial ecosystems globally. Absence of forest cover (i.e. exposure) has been suggested to play a role in selecting for insect flightlessness in montane ecosystems. Here, we capitalize on human-driven variation in alpine treeline elevation in New Zealand to test whether anthropogenic deforestation has caused shifts in the distributions of flight-capable and flightless phenotypes in a wing-polymorphic lineage of stoneflies from the Zelandoperla fenestrata species complex. Transect sampling revealed sharp transitions from flight-capable to flightless populations with increasing elevation. However, these phenotypic transitions were consistently delineated by the elevation of local treelines, rather than by absolute elevation, providing a novel example of human-driven evolution in response to recent deforestation. The inferred rapid shifts to flightlessness in newly deforested regions have implications for the evolution and conservation of invertebrate biodiversity.

人为环境变化可以支撑自然选择机制的重大转变，从而改变野生种群的进化轨迹。然而，人们对森林砍伐的进化影响知之甚少——这是全球陆地生态系统最普遍的人类驱动变化之一。森林覆盖的缺乏（即暴露）被认为在山地生态系统中选择昆虫不能飞行的过程中发挥作用。在这里，我们利用新西兰高山林线海拔的人类驱动变化来测试人为砍伐森林是否导致Zelandoperla fenestrata的石蝇翅膀多态谱系中具有飞行能力和不能飞行表型分布的变化物种复杂。横断面采样揭示了随着海拔的增加，从能够飞行的种群到不能飞行的种群的急剧转变。然而，这些表型转变始终由当地树线的海拔而不是绝对海拔来描绘，为应对最近的森林砍伐提供了人类驱动进化的新例子。推断在新砍伐森林地区迅速转变为无法飞行对无脊椎动物生物多样性的进化和保护具有影响。