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

由于激进的人类土地利用和气候变化，加拿大的北方森林，像世界上的许多地方一样，正在经历前所未有的变化。生态学家面临的挑战是了解这将如何影响生活在那里的有机体，并由此为社会提供关于未来生态系统将是什么样子这个问题的答案。这要求我们揭示环境变化通过自然选择影响个体的可塑性反应、通过自然选择影响基因频率以及通过改变特定年龄的生活史模式来影响种群动态的机制。要做到这一点，我们必须确定个体变异的性质(表型或遗传型)，这种变异如何与适应度有关，以及最重要的是，重要的生态变量(非生物和生物)如何驱动这些变化。这是一项艰巨的任务，但通过仔细选择适当的实验系统并对野外个体进行长期研究，有可能取得重大进展。

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.