Disturbances associated with climate change may push organisms beyond their resilience limits, and strong ecological consequences are expected when foundation species are affected. When predicting species’  responses to warming, species are typically considered as physiologically homogeneous. Yet, responses to extreme events may vary according to differences in phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation across the range of a species. Using a common-garden mesocosm experiment, we compared the resilience (i.e., response to and recovery from) to two warming events of different intensity on seagrass seedlings germinated from seeds collected at eight regions across the species’ distribution range. We show a positive relationship between resilience to warming and local thermal variability, suggesting seagrass evolutionary adaptation to local thermal conditions. Our results highlight the critical importance of incorporating intra-specific variability when making predictions and when developing conservation and restoration strategies about species vulnerability to climate change. Furthermore, strong negative lag-effects on seedlings performance were observed after the warming phase had already stopped, highlighting the importance of following species’ responses after a disturbance has finished, particularly because most experimental studies have only examined immediate, short-term, responses to stressors. Given the long-term common-garden approach used, we expect that differences in seedling responses will be mainly the result of genetic changes leading to local adaptation.

Primary Presenter: Fiona Tomas Nash, IMEDEA (fionamedes@gmail.com)

Authors:

Fiona Tomas, IMEDEA  (fiona@imedea.uib-csic.es)

Laura Pereda-Briones,   ()

Laura Royo,   ()

Vincent Combes,   ()

Enric Ballesteros,   ()

Sabrina Clemente,   ()

Gal·la Edery,   ()

Fernando Espino,   ()

Simone Farina,   ()

Yolanda Fernandez-Torquemada,   ()

Vasilis Gerovasileiou,   ()

Ivan Guala,   ()

Ljiijana Ivesa,   ()

Maria Sini,   ()

Gabriele Procaccini,   ()

Jorge Terrados,   ()

Lázaro Marin-Guirao,   ()

Fernando Tuya,   ()