Data from: The potential for evolutionary rescue in an arctic seashore plant threatened by climate change

The impacts of climate change may be particularly severe for
geographically isolated populations, which must adjust through plastic
responses or evolve. Here, we study an endangered arctic plant, Primula
nutans ssp. finmarchica, confined to Fennoscandian seashores and showing
indications of maladaptation to a warming climate. We evaluate the
potential of these populations to evolve to facilitate survival in the
rapidly warming Arctic (i.e. evolutionary rescue) by utilizing manual
crossing experiments in a nested half-sibling breeding design. We estimate
G-matrices, evolvability, and genetic constraints in traits with
potentially conflicting selection pressures. To explicitly evaluate the
potential for climate change adaptation, we infer the expected time to
evolve from a northern to a southern phenotype under different selection
scenarios, using demographic and climatic data to relate expected
evolutionary rates to projected rates of climate change. Our results
indicate that, given the nearly ten-fold greater evolvability of
vegetative than of floral traits, adaptation in these traits may take
place nearly in concert with changing climate, given effective climate
mitigation. However, the comparatively slow expected evolutionary
modification of floral traits may hamper the evolution of floral traits to
track climate-induced changes in the pollination environment, compromising
sexual reproduction and thus reducing the likelihood of evolutionary
rescue.