Range expansion can promote the evolution of plastic generalism in coarse-grained landscapes

Phenotypic plasticity is one way for organisms to deal with variable environments through generalism. However, plasticity is not found universally and its evolution may be constrained by costs and other limitations such as complexity: the need for multiple mutational steps before the adaptation is realized. Theory predicts that greater experienced heterogeneity, such as organisms may encounter when spatial heterogeneity is fine-grained relative to dispersal, should favor the evolution of a broader niche. Here we tested this prediction via simulation. We found that, contrary to classical predictions, coarse-grained landscapes can be the most favorable for the evolution of plasticity, but only when populations encountered those landscapes through range expansion. During these range expansions, coarse-grained landscapes select for each step in the complex mutational pathway to plastic generalism by blocking the dispersal of specialists. These circumstances provide ecological opportunities ..., This dataset comes from a computer simulation study and is generated from code that is also available in this repository., , # Range expansion can promote the evolution of plastic generalism in coarse-grained landscapes

[DOI: 10.5061/dryad.p8cz8w9xd]()

This dataset was created for a study of how the grain size of clustering of environmental heterogeneity could alter how like plastic generalism is to evolve using computer simulation models. All of the code for simulations was written in R and consists of two main experiments.

In one experiment (using the “clustering simulation script.R”), random landscapes were generated with variable levels of clustering to evaluate how the likelihood of plastic generalism arising on landscapes with a variety of clustering levels changed when populations were already located across the landscape vs. when they were expanding through the landscape. This experiment showed that in settled populations, the likelihood of plastic generalism evolving decreased with increasing grain size of clusters. However, in expanding populations coarse-grained landscapes led to plastic general...