Realization of ongoing evolutionary adaptation in the field

The rapid pace of environmental change has prompted pressing concerns about the persistence of wild populations. For plants, because they move from one place to another only passively between generations, their persistence is especially likely to depend on their capacity for ongoing adaptive evolution. There are numerous examples of rapid adaptation in the recent past, but evidence about rates of adaptation in the wild is limited. Previously, to assess the capacity for genetic adaptation of three wild plant populations growing in their source locations, we have estimated their additive genetic variance for fitness in three successive years. Here, we present the actual difference between successive generations in their average absolute fitness. We partition this change into components resulting from genetic change and due to environmental difference, as well as a residual component. In each of six cases of intergenerational change, we have detected evolutionary adaptation as genetic increase in average fitness during the first generation, while also finding generally greater effects of differences in environment between years. Nevertheless, we show that when environmental change reduces a population's average fitness, these adaptive genetic responses often substantively ameliorate its deleterious impact.