Transferring plants between populations of rare species has often been proposed to increase population size and replenish genetic variation. While this approach has many advantages, it may also disrupt local adaptation. However, the scale over which plants adapt to local conditions is hard to predict. To detect local adaptation, we conducted reciprocal transplant experiments in the field with s...

The rate and scale of gene flow can strongly affect patterns of local adaptation in host-parasite interactions. I used data on regional pathogen occurrence to infer the scale of pathogen dispersal and to identify pathogen metapopulations in the interaction between Plantago lanceolata and its specialist phytopathogen, Podosphaera plantaginis. Frequent extinctions and colonizations were recorded ...

Local long-term adaptation is a well-known feature of the synaptic junctions in nerve tissue. Neuroscientists have demonstrated that biology uses local adaptation both to tune the performance of neural circuits and for long-term learning. Many researchers believe it is key to the intelligent behavior and the efficiency of biological organizms. Although engineers use adaptation in feedback circu...

Understanding how genetic variation at individual loci contributes to adaptation of populations to different local environments is an important topic in modern evolutionary biology. To date, most evidence has pointed to conditionally neutral quantitative trait loci (QTL) showing fitness effects only in some environments, while there has been less evidence for single-locus fitness trade-offs. At...

Local adaptation is central for creating and maintaining spatial variation in plant-herbivore interactions. Short-lived insect herbivores feeding on long-lived plants are likely to adapt to their local host plants, because of their short generation time, poor dispersal, and geographically varying selection due to variation in plant defences. In a reciprocal feeding trial, we investigated the im...