Data from: Loss and recovery of ecological diversity associated with evolutionary rescue in abruptly and gradually deteriorating environments

Populations may survive environmental deterioration by evolutionary
adaptation.  However, such evolutionary rescue events may be
associated with ecological costs, such as reduction in growth performance
and loss of ecologically important genetic diversity.  Those
negative ecological consequences may be mitigated by additional adaptive
evolution.  Both the ecological costs and the opportunities for
additional evolution are contingent on the severity of environmental
deterioration.  Here we hypothesize that populations
evolutionarily rescued from faster, relative to slow, environmental
deterioration suffer more severe long-term fitness decline and diversity
loss.  An experiment with the model adaptive radiation of
bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens exposed to abruptly or gradually
increased antibiotic stress supported our hypothesis.  The effect
of additional adaptive evolution in recovering population size and
ecological diversity was far from perfect.  Cautions are
therefore needed in predicting the role of rapid evolution for mitigating
the impacts of environmental changes, in particular very fast
environmental deterioration.  We also found that bacterial
populations rescued from gradually increased antibiotic stress evolved
higher levels of antibiotic resistance, lending more support to aggressive
chemotherapy in pathogen control.