Evolution of Plastic Dispersal in Stable Environment: Local Information of Fitness Consequence

TL;DR

This paper proposes a model linking local demographic cues to dispersal decisions, enabling the evolution of adaptive dispersal strategies in complex landscapes without extensive landscape data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach connecting local environmental cues to dispersal fitness, simplifying modeling of dispersal evolution in complex landscapes.

Findings

Local cues can inform dispersal decisions effectively.

Accidental dispersal can promote adaptive dispersal evolution.

Model simplifies understanding dispersal evolution in complex environments.

Abstract

Fitness consequence of dispersal depends on property of the entire landscape, which patches are available and what are the cost of moving. These are information that are not available locally when an organism make the decision to disperse. This poses a problem to the organism, where it is unclear how an adaptive decision can be made. This also poses a problem to the scientist, since in order to study the adaptiveness of dispersal, we need information of the entire landscape. For theorist, this is through making a series of assumption about either the landscape or the organism, and for empiricists, this means a large amount of measurements needs to be made across a large area. In this paper, we propose a link between local demographic process, which an organism can have access to, to the fitness consequence of dispersal. This meant local environmental cue can be used for the decision on dispersal, and hence allow the evolution of plastic dispersal strategy. We will then show that using this approach, evolution of dispersal on complex landscape can be modelled with relative ease, and to show that accidental dispersal in one patch can drive the evolution of adaptive dispersal in another.