The costs and benefits of dispersal in small populations

Dispersal has three major effects on adaptation. First, gene flow mixes alleles adapted to different environments, potentially hindering (swamping) adaptation. Second, it brings in other variants and inflates genetic variance: this aids adaptation to spatially (and temporally) varying environments but if selection is hard, it lowers the mean fitness of the population. Third, neighbourhood size, which determines how weak genetic drift is, increases with dispersal—when genetic drift is strong, increase of the neighbourhood size with dispersal aids adaptation. In this note, I focus on the role of dispersal in environments that change gradually across space, and when local populations are quite small such that genetic drift has a significant effect. Using individual-based simulations, I show that in small populations, even leptokurtic dispersal benefits adaptation by reducing the power of genetic drift. This has implications for management of fragmented or marginal populations: the beneficial effect of increased dispersal into small populations is stronger than swamping of adaption under a broad range of conditions, including a mixture of local and long-distance dispersal. However, when environmental gradient is steep, heavily fat-tailed dispersal will swamp continuous adaptation so that only patches of locally adapted subpopulations remain. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Species’ ranges in the face of changing environments (Part II)’.