Asking the pikas politely…
Bridges evolutionary genetics, population demography, pollination ecology, and landscape climatology because predicting persistence requires all four to be modeled jointly rather than studied in isolation.
Alpine and subalpine plants of the southern Rocky Mountains face rapidly shifting snowmelt timing, summer drought, and pollinator phenology. Whether these populations can persist depends on a race between environmental change and biological response — through genetic adaptation, plastic adjustment, gene flow from better-adapted sources, or retreat into cooler microhabitats. Understanding which combinations of these mechanisms suffice for persistence, and where deliberate intervention might be needed, sits at the intersection of evolutionary biology, demography, and conservation practice. The answers shape both fundamental theory about eco-evolutionary dynamics and concrete decisions about whether to attempt assisted migration.
The unresolved questions cluster around the minimal ingredients for population persistence under directional climate change. Single-trait selection appears sufficient in some populations but not others, and the conditions that distinguish these outcomes — standing genetic variation, the architecture of plastic responses, dispersal connectivity, pollinator reliability — are not yet integrated into predictive frameworks. A parallel gap concerns spatial refugia: whether topographically buffered microhabitats are large enough and well-enough connected to maintain adaptive genetic variation, or whether contraction into them accelerates drift-driven loss of evolutionary potential. Bridging these gaps requires linking population genomics, quantitative genetics, fine-scale microclimate mapping, and demographic projection within a common modeling structure, and then asking whether deliberate seed transfer can substitute for the gene flow that natural dispersal does not provide. Generalizing from a few intensively studied species to broader community-level inference is itself a major step.
Progress is constrained by data gaps (population-specific heritabilities, dispersal estimates, multi-year vital rates under drought), method gaps (integrating genomic, quantitative-genetic, and demographic inference into a single predictive framework), and scale mismatches between fine-grained microclimate heterogeneity and the spatial resolution of climate projections. Coordination gaps also matter: reciprocal transplant and seed-transfer trials are labor-intensive and rarely replicated across enough species to support community-level inference. Finally, translation gaps separate evolutionary-rescue theory from the operational decisions land managers face when considering assisted migration.
Several concrete advances would move the boundary. A coordinated multi-species reciprocal transplant and assisted-migration network across the elevational gradient, with standardized monitoring of survival, reproduction, and plastic versus genetic trait contributions, would let comparative inference replace single-species case studies. Coupling drone-lidar topography and distributed microclimate sensor arrays with population genomic sampling within and among putative microrefugia could test whether buffered habitats are evolutionarily viable rather than just demographically buffered. A shared individual-based eco-evolutionary simulation platform — parameterized with empirical heritabilities, dispersal kernels, and pollinator interaction data — would let researchers explore which combinations of genetic variation, plasticity, and gene flow are minimally sufficient for rescue under alternative climate trajectories. Pilot assisted-migration plots with paired control and recipient-site pollinator surveys could provide the empirical foundation for transfer-distance guidelines. Finally, a synthesis effort consolidating fragmented transplant and demographic datasets across RMBL-area plant species would enable cross-species generalization.
Concrete, fundable actions categorized by kind of work and effort tier (near-term = single lab; ambitious = focused multi-year program; major = multi-institutional; consortium = agency-program scale).
Descriptions of needed data (not existing datasets), drawn directly from the atomic statements feeding this frontier.
Findings would inform decisions by federal land managers — including BLM Resource Management Plan revisions and U.S. Forest Service vegetation and restoration planning — about whether and how to incorporate assisted migration into climate adaptation strategies. State-level conservation programs evaluating seed-sourcing policies for restoration would benefit directly, as would U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service deliberations on listing or recovery criteria for climate-sensitive plants. Within research, advances would tighten the link between evolutionary-rescue theory and empirical demography, making the southern Rockies a reference system for testing whether eco-evolutionary models can deliver actionable predictions. Pollinator-dependent crop and restoration contexts could also draw on improved understanding of how plant–pollinator matches shift under translocation.
Every claim in the synthesis above derives from the source atomic statements below, grouped by their research neighborhood of origin. Click a neighborhood to follow its primer and full citation chain.
Framing notes: Although only three atomic statements seed this entry, they converge tightly on the evolutionary-rescue question, warranting a unified frontier rather than separate ones for microrefugia and assisted migration.