Can plants evolve quickly enough to adapt to a planet that is warming so rapidly?

Press release UGA

In a unique international experiment involving biologists from Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, hundreds of small plots of Arabidopsis, the standard laboratory plant, were sown in various types of climates, ranging from the alpine mountains of the Lautaret Garden (UGA/CNRS) to deserts. Scientists allowed them to evolve over a three-year period. These simultaneous experiments demonstrated that this adaptation can occur in just three generations, identified the genetic variants associated with adaptation to different climates, and revealed a climate tipping point beyond which plants can no longer adapt.

The growing threat that climate change poses to biodiversity has highlighted rapid evolutionary processes that may help save populations over short ecological time scales. Although evidence of rapid evolution in response to new environments is growing, there is a need for large-scale, replicated, multi-year experiments that allow for tracking genomic changes over several years in different environments. This is why scientists designed the GReNE-net experiment, which involves sowing the same species at some thirty different sites across Western Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and North America, then letting nature take its course for three years, with no maintenance other than minimal weeding. This species is Arabidopsis thaliana, a small annual plant related to mustard, a model organism for plant biology studies.

3.5 million Arabidopsis seeds, collected from 231 locations around the world, have been sown!

At each of the thirty sites around the world, thousands of young Arabidopsis plants bloomed and produced seeds, which germinated, giving rise to new young plants, which in turn produced seeds… And so, generation after generation followed. Three years of monitoring, thousands of plants across a dozen independent replicates at each site, some thirty sites, and regular analysis of the genetic material’s sequence after extraction… the scientists were able to track in real time the genetic changes accompanying this evolution. For what was originally sown were mixtures of thousands of seeds of the same Arabidopsis species, but from harvests conducted at 231 locations around the world—and thus from populations genetically adapted to extremely diverse environments. All that remained, therefore, was to track how, generation after generation, a particular genetic variant could confer an advantage on a plant once it was placed in a new environment—whether similar or radically different: to track this experiment in synchronized evolution replicated on a global scale, it was necessary to sequence the entire genomes of approximately 70,000 surviving plants!

These populations were thus monitored under various climatic conditions, ranging from the snow-covered Alps at the Col du Lautaret to the Negev Desert, from urban areas in Europe to the suburbs of Montpellier in a Mediterranean climate, from subtropical regions such as Austin, Texas, to the cold, humid areas of the Forez, in Saint-Just-en-Chevalet, not far from the dormant volcanoes of Auvergne.

Scientists have observed remarkably rapid and reproducible selection, under the same climatic conditions, of genetic variants likely to contribute to important ecological traits in plants, such as germination, flowering, and stress responses. However, in the hottest environments—which are expected to become more common with global climate change—the researchers identified eco-evolutionary tipping points where extreme selection… exceeds the population’s adaptive potential. Thus, although rapid climate adaptation is possible thanks to existing genetic variation, this experiment helps us understand which environmental, genetic, or species-specific conditions dictate the limits of evolution, in order to predict biodiversity’s responses to climate change.

Genetic diversity within a population is an asset in the context of climate change… within certain limits

In summary, as stated by Moises Expósito-Alonso (University of California, Berkeley), one of the lead editors of this article:

"For a population to survive in the long term while facing climate change, it is highly likely that it will have to undergo natural selection. And the fewer evolutionary resources it has, the more difficult it will be for the population to maintain its size after five years, at least in warm climates. We can hypothesize that each species may require its own long-term experience to understand its genetic vulnerabilities, but with this type of modeling—calibrated to a model species—and a deep understanding of the pace of evolution and the magnitude of climate shifts and adaptation, we could potentially help hundreds or thousands of species survive. Nature appears stable to human observers. For example, California’s grasslands and forests look pretty much the same season after season—but the genetic makeup is constantly changing. So being able to track that is kind of my dream.”

Reference

Xing Wu, Tatiana Bellagio, Yunru Peng, Lucas Czech et al., 2026. Rapid adaptation and extinction across climates in synchronized outdoor evolution experiments of Arabidopsis thaliana, Science, Vol 391, Issue 6792. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adz0777

This press release was initially published by UGA.

Updated on 27 March 2026