Data for: Warmer is better for evolutionary rescue, driving a warm-to-cold bias in habitat colonization dynamics

Higher temperatures can accelerate population evolutionary speed and hence speciation rate; and this is a major reason for the uneven distribution of biodiversity on Earth. Here we address the importance of temperature for short-term evolutionary dynamics. Specifically, the chance for populations to survive lethal environmental stresses through the occurrence and fixation of tolerant genotypes (namely evolutionary rescue) would be greater at warmer temperatures. With dispersal among habitats, the advantage in evolutionary rescue for warmer populations, together with population extinction caused by environmental stresses, may cause a bias in habitat colonization dynamics toward the warm-to-cold direction. Those hypotheses were supported by our experiments with a model microbial system. Our results show that warmer temperatures can promote the maintenance of biodiversity by facilitating rapid evolution, and help to understand how the “out of the tropics” pattern in species range shift or within-species gene flow may emerge.