Lastly, we show that an environmental change that also negatively affects a resource species will always reduce the probability of consumer rescue.

Any feedback is welcome and much appreciated!

Consumers are also shown to be more resilient to reductions in resource acquisition rates compared to resource conversion efficiencies, since reductions in the former lead to more rapid ecological release. Overall, these results suggest that decline rates alone are an imperfect predictor of rescue.

We show that consumer populations are much more resilient to increases in mortality than they are to decreases in fecundity, since increased mortality accelerates adaptation by increasing individual turnover, reducing generation time.

We show that density-dependence typically hinders rescue. However, this effect declines with the magnitude of maladaptation. We also make the previously unappreciated point that an env. change that decreases consumer fitness may also affect density-dependence, depending on the affected trait.

Here we simulate evolutionary rescue in a consumer-resource model, where consumer fitness is a function of its resource acquisition rates, conversion efficiencies, and survival rates, and density-dependence arises through limited resource availability.

Excited to finally have the pre-print up for this work on evolutionary rescue from my PhD at UBC!

Previous theoretical work on the effects of negative density-dependent growth on evolutionary rescue has uncovered inconsistent results, leading to an incomplete understanding of its influence.