Adapting to extreme environments: hybridisation and the evolution of contemporary heavy metal tolerance

Climate change, urbanisation and exploitation of natural resources increasingly alter the environment, posing
significant challenges for plants and animals. For species to adapt to such fast paced change, they will either need to
draw on new genetic variation, which is likely to emerge very slowly, or on existing standing variation, which is
potentially very fast. Another possibility is that adaptive alleles will be acquired via hybridisation with closely related
species, facilitating rapid adaptation through the re-use of existing adaptive variation. Repeated evolution of the same
adaptive trait offers unique opportunities to investigate genetic underpinning of rapid adaptation, ultimately informing
us about the extent to which evolutionary responses to a changing climate might be predictable.