The role of spatial and temporal resource variability in the life history evolution of boreal mammals

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Canada's boreal forest, like many parts of the world, is undergoing unprecedented change due to aggressive human landuse and climate change. The challenge for ecologists is to understand how this will affect the organisms living there and from this, provide society with answers to the question of what ecosystems will look like in the future. This requires that we unravel the mechanisms whereby environmental change affects plastic responses of individuals, genotype frequency through natural selection, and population dynamics through changes in age-specific life history patterns. To do so, we must characterize the nature of individual variation (phenotypic or genotypic), how this variation relates to fitness, and most importantly, how important ecological variables (abiotic and biotic) drive these changes. This is a formidable task but it is possible to make significant advances by carefully selecting an appropriate experimental system and conducting long-term studies of individuals in the wild.