Data from: Evolutionary responses to historic drought across the range of scarlet monkeyflower

Adaptive evolution is a key means for populations to persist under
environmental change, yet whether populations across a species’ range can
adapt quickly enough to keep pace with climate change remains unknown. The
breeder’s equation predicts the evolutionary change in a trait from one
generation to the next as the product of the selection differential and
the narrow-sense heritability in that trait. Incorporating these aspects
of the breeder’s equation, we performed a resurrection study with the
scarlet monkeyflower (Mimulus cardinalis) to evaluate whether traits
associated with drought adaptation have evolved in populations across a
species’ range in response to extreme drought. We compared trait and
fitness differences of pre-drought ancestors and post-drought descendants
from six populations transplanted into three latitudinally-arrayed common
gardens and quantified phenotypic selection and trait heritabilities. The
strength, direction, and mode of selection varied among traits and
gardens. Trait heritabilities were relatively low and did not differ
dramatically among populations or gardens. Overall, instances of
evolutionary responses between ancestors and descendants were few and
small in magnitude, but the magnitude of these evolutionary differences
varied among gardens. Together, these results suggest that the expression
of genetic variation, and thus traits, depends on the environment, and
that environmental variability in field settings may mask the genetic
variation that is often detected in greenhouse environments.