EvolRescueOnline-Topic 1

The genetic properties of a population can enable or constrain evolutionary change, but they can also influence its ability to persist. In this talk, we develop quantitative ways to characterize genetic constraints that account simultaneously for the failure of a population to evolve or to persist. To illustrate, we show how to define constraints on the adaptive evolution of quantitative traits (in terms of critical amounts of additive-genetic variance) that account for a population’s capacity to persist in a changed environment where it risks extinction unless it can evolve.

Populations may become adapted to conditions that would be lethal to their ancestors. This process must involve the correlated response to adaptation at sublethal levels of stress. I shall review the experimental support for this mechanism and discuss the roles of population size, standing variation, mutation supply rate and the rate of environmental degradation.

The evolutionary-demography approach to study individual and population responses to global change has recently benefitted from various methodological advances, and from long-term projects with individual monitoring. In this talk, we will provide an illustrated overview of a/ advances in evolutionary ecology where repeated individual records have been used to explore phenotypic as well as genetic changes in bird phenology, as a response to climate change; b/ demographic mechanisms at the multi-population scale that underlie patterns of population dynamics (and, ultimately, range dynamics) and how these processes are affected by climate change; and c/ the growing interface between the two previous fields: we will illustrate how recent work by colleagues now makes available a framework integrating ecological and evolutionary dynamics in stochastic environments to make a link between phenotypic and demographic responses to environmental change.