"adaptive differentiation" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to describe a process or system in which something changes or adapts in response to specific distinguishing factors or differences. For example, "The CEO implemented an adaptive differentiation strategy for the company's hiring process."
This challenges the common assumption of local adaptation and indicates the need to examine adaptive differentiation across a broad range of environments and spatial scales to provide appropriate guidelines for restoration genetics.
When considering patterns of adaptive differentiation, Leimu and Fischer (2008) found that local adaptation was less prevalent in small compared with large populations.
However, high gene flow rates between host-associated populations could prevent local adaptation, while adaptive phenotypic plasticity may be favored over adaptive differentiation in organisms living in fluctuating environments (Thibert-Plante and Hendry 2010) such as most agricultural environments.
The extent of adaptive differentiation between populations and ecotypes will often reflect a balance between differentiating effects of selection and homogenising effects of gene flow [ 4, 5].
Firstly, the importance of QST and population size in predicting local adaptation indicates the role of selection and stochastic processes in determining patterns of adaptive differentiation (see also Hereford and Winn 2008).
Despite this thermal flexibility, I also observed potentially adaptive differentiation among populations, particularly within the native range.
Kolbe, J. J., Leal, M., Schoener, T. W., Spiller, D. A. & Losos, J. B. Founder effects persist despite adaptive differentiation: a field experiment with lizards.
Whether this rapid evolution is primarily due to adaptive differentiation or relaxed selective constraint remains an open question.
Growing understanding of physiological differences among AOA suggests adaptive differentiation, which may support niche partitioning in the natural environment.
Kolbe, J. J., M. Leal, T. W. Schoener, D. A. Spiller, and J. B. Losos, Founder Effects Persist Despite Adaptive Differentiation: A Replicated Field Experiment in a Caribbean Lizard, Science, vol. 335 (2012), pp. 1086-1089 [doi].
The purpose of this study is to develop an efficient model-based approach to perform Bayesian exploratory analyses for adaptive differentiation in very large SNP data sets.
