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 ..., Trait data of Primula nutans ssp. finmarchica common-garden cultivated plant individuals, both of parental (P) generation collected from the field in northern Finland (southern populations: populations B and E) and Norway (northern population: population G), and of F1 generation which are offspring of manual crossings of P generation according to a nested half-sibling/full-sibling crossing design., , # **Data and analysis code for journal article \"The potential for evolutionary rescue in an arctic seashore plant threatened by climate change\"**

Access this dataset on Dryad: [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.573n5tbfm](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.573n5tbfm)

This dataset is associated with the research paper:

Mattila ALK*, Opedal ØH*, Hällfors MH, Pietikäinen L, Koivusaari SHM, Hyvärinen M-T *(*Authors share equal contribution*). 2024. The potential for evolutionary rescue in an arctic seashore plant threatened by climate change. *Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences*. doi:10.1098/rspb.2024.1351

We studied the evolutionary potential of an endangered arctic seashore perennial herb, the Fennoscandian subspecies of the Siberian primrose (*Primula nutans* ssp. *finmarchica* (Jacq.) Á. Löve & D.). This species has a disjunct distribution, with the northern variety (var. *finmarchica*) limited by the Arctic Sea in Norway and the southern variety (var. *jokelae* L. Mäkin...,