The influence of environmental change and evolution on population dynamics

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Understanding how environmental change drives population dynamics of species is a long-standing goal of ecology. It is also critical for our ability to effectively conserve and manage threatened and invasive species, because environmental change can play a huge role in whether populations invade, persist or go extinct. More recently, scientists have begun to recognize that evolution on contemporary time scales can also play a role in influencing population dynamics. A current challenge in ecology is to integrate the role of evolution in population dynamics with the major environmental changes the world currently faces, including climate change and habitat fragmentation. My research program will tackle this challenge in two complementary ways. First, we will examine how variability in the environment affects the timing of when plants flower and how much energy they allocate to making flowers and seeds. We will determine which strategies are optimal given current levels of climate variation, and make predictions for how increasing variability will influence the optimal strategies of the plants and the ability of populations to persist. Our results will contribute to evaluating long-standing theory and will highlight characteristics of species that may be more vulnerable to climate change. Second, we will investigate the process of populations spreading through new habitats. Understanding the process of spread is crucial to understanding which native species will be able to shift their ranges with climate change and which introduced species are likely to become the most invasive. Specifically, we will study the role of evolution and interactions with other species on the speed at which a target species can move through continuous compared to fragmented habitats. Our work will include the first field experiments to tackle these questions, and our results will play an important role in the advancement of this field and contribute to more effective conservation and management strategies.