Data from: The genetic architecture of fitness drives population viability during rapid environmental change

The rapid global loss of biodiversity calls for improved predictions of
how populations will evolve and respond demographically to ongoing
environmental change. The heritability (h2) of selected traits has long
been known to affect evolutionary and demographic responses to
environmental change. However, effects of the genetic architecture
underlying the h2 of a selected trait on population responses to selection
are less well understood. We use deterministic models and stochastic
simulations to show that the genetic architecture underlying h2 can
dramatically affect population viability during environmental change.
Polygenic trait architectures (many loci, each with a small phenotypic
effect) conferred higher population viability than genetic architectures
with the same initial h2 and large-effect loci under a wide range of
scenarios. Population viability also depended strongly on the initial
frequency of large-effect beneficial alleles, with moderately low initial
allele frequencies conferring higher viability than rare or
already-frequent large-effect alleles. Greater population viability
associated with polygenic architectures appears to be due to higher short
term evolutionary potential compared to architectures with large-effect
loci. These results suggest that integrating information on the trait
genetic architecture into quantitiative genetic analysis will
substantially improve our understanding and prediction of evolutionary and
demographic responses to environmental change.