Figure 1. Framework to assess the environment-dependent impact of phenotypic plasticity on adaptive evolution. First, the three key environmental change components (rate of change, variance and autocorrelation) each influences the two broad categories of non-plastic mechanisms through which natural populations respond to changing environments. The first category encompasses evolutionary processes, such as heritability, genetic variation, and natural selection. The second consists of ecological processes such as demographic dynamics driven by fluctuations in population size and life history. At the core of our conceptual framework, all mechanisms discussed influences how well a population tracks the fitness peak, which shifts as the environment changes. Plasticity enters the framework by impacting a populations’ ability to adaptively track the fitness peak. Decomposing environmental change into key components in this fashion allows us to contextualize the magnitude and direction of plasticity’s impact on population persistence and adaptive evolution, by way of the mechanistic links.