Extending the concept of local adaptation

Most species occur in subdivided (fragmented) populations. For many years I have been studying local adaptation in such populations. In my individual project I want to bring this to a new level, by exploring local adaptation across a set of more than 200 populations. The data come from populations of the planktonic crustacean Daphnia magna collected from pond and lakes of most of the Holarctic. We collected so far data for more than 60 phenotypic traits, local habitat variables (e.g. ecology, climate), geographic coordinates and genomic sequences for all populations. While we analysed these data so far only with a trait by traits approach, I want to explore now how local adaptation of different traits influences each other, exploring if local adaptation of different traits constrains or facilitates each other. This exploration will be conducted on a phenotypic (local adaptation syndromes) and genomic (degree of overlap of genetic architecture) level. I expect that this project will be of interest for other people studying local adaptation of widely spread model systems, with implication for our understanding how local adaptation in complex environments evolves.