Microevolutionary system identification and climate response predictions

Abstract

AbstractMicroevolutionary system identification was introduced in Ergon (2022), with the specific purpose to show that predictions of genetic adaptations to climate change require that environmental reference values are properly defined. The theoretical development was then limited to single-input single-output (SISO) systems, and the simulations used a toy example with spring temperature as input and mean breeding date as output. Generations were assumed to be non-overlapping. Here, the theory is extended to cover multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, while the simulation example uses two environmental inputs (spring temperature and rainfall) and two adaptive phenotypic outputs (breeding date and breeding habitat). These extended simulations reveal difficulties involved in predictions of genetic adaptations for complex systems based on short data, where the reference environment values are not included.