资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Our ability to predict how species will respond to human-induced rapid environmental change (HIREC) may depend upon our understanding of transgenerational plasticity (TGP), which occurs when environments experienced by previous generations influence phenotypes of subsequent generations. TGP evolved to help organisms cope with environmental stressors when parental environments are highly predictive of offspring environments. HIREC can alter conditions that favored TGP in historical environments by reducing parents' ability to detect environmental con ditions, disrupting previous correlations between parental and offspring environments, one interfering with the transmission of parental cues to offspring. Because of the propensity to pro duce errors in these processes, TGP will likely generate negative fitness outcomes in response to HIREC, though beneficial fitness outcomes may occur in some cases.