Quantifying the probability of evolutionary rescue

Matthew Osmond, Hildegard Uecker, Carla Alejandre, Ernesto Berríos-Caro, Dale Clement, Peter Czuppon, Léonard Dekens, Puneeth Deraje, Jeremy Draghi, Asad Hasan, Robert D. Holt , Teemu Kuosmanen, Alexander Longcamp, Loïc Marrec, Guillaume Martin, Christin Nyhoegen, Maria Orive, Vrinda Ravi Kumar, Remus Stana, Lindi Wahl, Masato Yamamichi

While evolutionary rescue is now a well-established term, there are subtleties in precisely defining it and conceptual complications in quantifying its probability. In this Perspective, we pay special attention to three issues: 1) How do we know that a population would go extinct in the absence of evolution? 2) How do we determine the probability of rescue if persistence is possible in the absence of evolution? 3) How can we capture the time-varying effect of evolution on persistence? Through this, we gain a dynamic and nuanced view that goes beyond certain extinction and ultimate persistence and demonstrate how to quantify the time-varying effect of evolution on persistence from extinction times of ensembles of evolving and non-evolving populations.