Adaptive and Plastic Responses to Environmental Variation: Introduction to a Virtual Symposium in The Biological Bulletin.

Abstract

Climate change is rapidly restructuring communities and altering the distribution of biodiversity along coastlines worldwide.While many species have undergone range shifts to track their niche, other taxa may adapt to, or tolerate, the changing conditions in which they find themselves. Forecasting the biological responses of coastal systems to global change is critical, given the ecological disruption to diverse communities (Zhang et al., 2017. Proc. R. Soc. B Biol. Sci. 284: 20171772), the importance of their resources to global food security (Costello et al., 2020. Nature 588: 95–100), and the vulnerable ecosystem services provided by coastal taxa (He and Silliman, 2019. Curr. Biol. 29: R1021–R1035). However, such forecasting efforts are challenged by key differences between aquatic (marine and freshwater) and terrestrial organisms, including their life histories and physical properties of their respective environments (Pinsky et al., 2019.Nature 569: 108–111; Shlesinger andLoya, 2019. Science 365: 1002–1007). Over the past decade, researchers have built upon syntheses of prior efforts (e.g., Hoffmann and Sgro, 2011. Nature 470: 479–485; Doney et al., 2012. Annu. Rev. Mar. Sci. 4: 11–37) to better predict evolutionary responses of coastal ecosystems to climate change, leading to novel insights (Munday et al., 2013. Ecol. Lett. 12: 1488–1500; Baltar et al., 2019. Trends Ecol. Evol. 34: 1022–1033) and new research networks (e.g., https://rcn-ecs.github.io). However, challenges remain for exploring organismal and community responses to future conditions in aquatic habitats. To effectivelymodel the response of diverse organisms to changing stress regimes, we require more exploration of phenotypic diversity across environments, a