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

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One of the greatest challenges faced by mankind over the next decades is to understand and predict the consequences of the current rapid and important environmental changes. 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. In this context, there is thus a vital need to quantify how selective pressures, quantitative genetics parameters and phenotypic plasticity, for multiple traits in wild animal populations, may vary with changes in the environment. I suggest that assessing evolutionary and plastic changes over time and space, using multi-trait approaches, under a realistic range of environmental conditions are crucial steps toward improving our understanding of the evolution and adaptation of natural populations. Over the next five years, my students and I will integrate 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. The short term objectives of our research will be to quantify genetic architecture, phenotypic plasticity and selective pressures acting on and among several key traits, under environmental conditions reflecting different habitat quality. To achieve our main research objectives, my research team and I will have access to exceptional long-term data sets from two birds (Tree swallow and Blue tit) and one mammal (Eastern chipmunk) species. All three systems include several thousand marked individuals, with information on phenotypes and relatedness obtained over many generations and in contrasting habitats. Our work will help reaching the long term objectives of my research program which are to uncover the factors shaping the adaptive potential of wild animal populations facing changing environmental conditions and provide an improved assessment of the environmental sensitivity of selection and 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.