One of the key questions in ecosystem restoration is the choice of the seed material for restoring plant communities. The most common strategy is to use local seed sources, based on the argument that many plants are locally adapted and thus local seed sources should provide the best restoration success. However, the evidence for local adaptation is inconsistent, and some of these inconsistencie...

Treatment of Tuberculosis (TB) and multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is a public good, due to the risk of transmission of infectious strains and the potential amplification of drug-resistance. The provision of this public good by government programmes has to bear a tension between standardized guidelines within programmatic constraints and local adaptation responding to needs for indiv...

Local adaptation by natural selection is a fundamental process in population differentiation and speciation. To determine if populations are adapted to local conditions, researchers use reciprocal transplant experiments: individuals are moved among populations to compare their performance in familiar (local) and foreign (nonlocal) conditions. These experiments are meant to evaluate whether adap...

Host–parasite interactions constitute one of the best settings in which adaptation in spatially and temporally heterogeneous environments can be studied. Indeed, the effects of parasitism are likely to be highly variable in time and among different host populations. The recognition of such a geographical mosaic view of coevolution (Thompson, 1994, 1999) has stimulated several empirical, experim...

Understanding patterns and correlates of local adaptation in heterogeneous landscapes can provide important information in the selection of appropriate seed sources for restoration. We assessed the extent of local adaptation of fitness components in 12 population pairs of the perennial herb Rutidosis leptorrhynchoides (Asteraceae) and examined whether spatial scale (0.7-600 km), environmental d...

The traditional view of the species as the fundamental unit of evolution has been challenged by observations that in heterogeneous environments, gene flow may be too restricted to overcome the effects of local selection. Whether a species evolves as a cohesive unit depends critically on the dynamic balance between homogenizing gene flow among populations and potentially disruptive local adaptat...

The ability of populations to rapidly adapt to new environments will determine their future in an increasingly human-modified world. Although meta-analyses do frequently uncover signatures of local adaptation, they also reveal many exceptions. We suggest that particular constraints on local adaptation might arise when organisms are exposed to novel stressors, such as anthropogenic pollution. To...

Image motion is initially detected locally. Local motion signals are then integrated across space in order to specify the global motion of objects or surfaces. It is well known that prolonged exposure to motion causes adaptation at the local motion level. We have investigated whether adaptation also occurs at the global motion level. We have devised a global motion stimulus (a random dot kinema...

This note examines the relationships between climate-related vulnerabilities, adaptation practices, institutions, and external interventions to show the role and importance of local institutions in climate change. It proposes an analytical framework to classify adaptation practices based on their relationship to different forms of environmental risks. It examines past adaptation responses to cl...

Population genetic models predict that alleles with small selection coefficients may be swamped by migration and will not contribute to local adaptation. But if most alleles contributing to standing variation are of small effect, how does local adaptation proceed? Here I review predictions of population and quantitative genetic models and use individual-based simulations to illustrate how the a...