Local adaptation is highest in populations with stable long-term growth

Theory suggests that the drivers of demographic variation and local adaptation are shared and may feedback on one other. Despite some evidence for these links in controlled settings, the relationship between local adaptation and demography remains largely unexplored in natural conditions. Using 10 years of demographic data and two reciprocal transplant experiments, we tested predictions about the relationship between the magnitude of local adaptation and demographic variation (population growth rates and their elasticities to vital rates) across 10 populations of a well-studied annual plant. In both years, we found a strong unimodal relationship between mean home-away local adaptation and stochastic population growth rates. Other predicted links were either weakly or not supported by our data. Our results suggest that declining and rapidly growing populations exhibit reduced local adaptation, potentially due to maladaptation and relaxed selection, respectively.

Methods
This dataset includes long-term data collected using observations and environmetnal sensors, data on population dynamics derived from field census data, and data from 2 years of reciprocal transplants in field conditions. Data describing population dynamics have been processed from raw census data using matrix population models. All other data processing is performed using code that is archived along with the data.