Distinguishing between Acclimation and Adaptation

One of the major problems with predicting the responses of species to future conditions is that experiments in which plants are grown in manipulated environments are really studies of acclimatory (i.e., the plastic response of individuals) rather than of adaptive (i.e., evolutionary) responses. While acclimatory responses are of interest for long-lived plants, which are likely to survive until the future conditions arrive, and for crop plants, which are artificially selected, the evolutionary ramifications of the response to climate change are far reaching and poorly understood. Climate

change scientists often confuse the processes of acclimation and adaptation (Backhausen and Scheibe 1999), which hinders our understanding of the impacts of climate change. This chapter will deal with the two processes and explain how carefully distinguishing between acclimation and adaptation can assist us in understanding and predicting the impacts of the changing climate.