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

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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.