Population responses to a historic drought across the range of the common monkeyflower (Mimulus guttatus).

Premise: Due to climate change, more frequent and intense periodic droughts are predicted to increasingly pose major challenges to the persistence of plant populations. When a severe drought occurs over a broad geographical region, independent responses by individual populations provide replicated natural experiments for examining the evolution of drought resistance and the potential for evolutionary rescue.

Methods: We used a resurrection approach to examine trait evolution in populations of the common monkeyflower, Mimulus guttatus, exposed to a record drought in California from 2011 to 2017.