Eco-evolutionary dynamics of mammals and their response to human and climate induced changes in the boreal forest

由于激进的人类土地利用和气候变化，加拿大的北方森林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，并由此向社会提供未来管理生态系统所需的信息。这要求我们揭示环境变化如何影响个体内部的反应(可塑性)、跨代特征(微进化)和特定于年龄的生活史模式(种群动态)，然后将这些发现与管理联系起来。这是一项艰巨的任务，但通过精心设计的实验和对野外个体的长期研究，有可能取得重大进展。正是在这种背景下，我的实验室处于有利地位，可以做出重大贡献。我的长期目标是确定资源脉动和气候变化如何影响食物供应和捕食等基本生态因素，从而影响野生环境的生态进化动态。我以这一基本知识为基础，解决与影响北方森林的人类(土地利用和资源开采)和气候引起的变化有关的应用问题。我在哺乳动物身上工作，利用每年食物供应的极端自然变化或快速的人类土地利用来提供自然的和计划的实验。人类土地利用和管理方面的参与提供了机会，通过行业和政府合作，为高知名度物种(狼、林地驯鹿)的高成本研究提供资金。

Canada’s boreal forest 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 information necessary to manage ecosystems in the future. This requires that we unravel how environmental change affects within-individual responses (plasticity), traits across generations (microevolution), and age-specific life history patterns (population dynamics) and then link these findings to management. This is a formidable task but it is possible to make significant advances through well-designed experiments and long-term studies of individuals in the wild. It is in this context that my lab is well-positioned to make a significant contribution. My long-term objective is to determine how resource pulses and changing climate affect fundamental ecological factors such as food supply and predation to influence eco-evolutionary dynamics in the wild. I build on this basic knowledge to address applied questions related to human (land use and resource extraction) and climate induced changes affecting the boreal forest. I work on mammals and take advantage of extreme natural variation in annual food supply or rapid human land use to provide natural and planned experiments. Involvement of the human landuse and management dimension provides the opportunity to fund high cost research on high profile species (wolves, woodland caribou) through industry and government collaborations.