The impact of environmental variability on evolutionary processes in wild animal populations / Impact de la variabilité environnementale sur les processus évolutifs des populations

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My research program seeks to elucidate the factors shaping the adaptive potential of wild animal populations that face changing environmental conditions by assessing both their evolutionary potentials and their phenotypic plasticity. The increasing human population and the expansion of its activities are causing changes at an unprecedented rate. The impacts of these changes on the evolutionary processes that produce and maintain biodiversity, however, have received relatively little attention. That is surprising given that extinction risk is tightly linked to a species' evolutionary potential and to its ability to express adaptive phenotypic plasticity. Species with low adaptive potential or maladapted/reduced plasticity have little chance of persistence in a changing environment. Yet, almost all previous studies that assessed evolutionary change over time or space have assumed that the environment remains constant over the study period. That assumption has left a gap in our understanding of limits to plasticity and evolutionary potential across traits, populations, and species. I suggest that incorporating environmental variability in evolutionary genetics models is a much-needed step towards the integration of ecology and evolution and will provide a much greater understanding of the processes that shape and maintain biodiversity. Over the next five years, my students and I will combine ecological and evolutionary theories with state-of-the-art techniques and detailed field-based data, combining molecular ecology, quantitative genetics and long-term monitoring of individually marked wild animals. Our research will quantify additive genetic variance and covariance as well as phenotypic plasticity for several individual traits in two bird study systems, to assess how selective pressures act on and among those traits under different environmental conditions and habitat quality. By so doing, our work will provide a much-improved assessment of the environmental sensitivity of selection and of the spatial and temporal scale of adaptation. My program is set to train highly qualified personnel and provide major advances in our understanding of the patterns and mechanisms behind responses to environmental change.