Behavioural landscape ecology: scaling-up from individuals to populations under rapid environmental changes / Écologie comportementale à l'échelle du paysage: de l'individu à la population lors de changements rapides des conditions environnementales

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Rapid environmental changes can lead to maladaptive behavioral responses when individuals fail to recognise the mismatch between perceived and actual fitness outcomes associated to specific resources or behaviors. Indeed, rapid environmental changes can alter the historical correlations between environmental cues and fitness, and lead individuals to engage into behaviors that ultimately lower their breeding success or survival. Such maladaptive responses have been referred to as evolutionary traps, and when related to habitat selection, as ecological traps.******Wild bees and farmland birds, particularly aerial insectivorous ones, show strong population declines coinciding with the recent agricultural intensification (AI) that occurred in North America and Europe. The rapidity of this AI and the fact that intensively cultivated areas retain habitat attributes of natural grasslands and “ancient” farmlands are likely conducive to maladaptive behavioral responses by animals using “modern” farmlands. Indeed, cultivated fields are likely to present environmental conditions analogous to those found in natural open habitats such as grasslands, at least early in the growing season. Cultivated fields may thereby draw individuals to settle in sites which eventually decrease abruptly in quality because of mechanical treatments, such as harvesting, or toxicological and trophic effects resulting from pesticide applications. Worse, cultivated fields could even exert a greater attraction than alternative habitats despite being detrimental. Hence, AI has the potential to create evolutionary traps and if dispersal cannot help organisms avoid or escape such traps, then individual performance as well as that of their populations must depend on phenotypic plasticity and/or on evolutionary responses.******My students and I will investigate how AI can influence dispersal behavior and cause departures from “ideal” habitat selection in the Tree Swallow. We will also assess the reliability of landscape composition cues as indicators of prey availability and contamination by pesticides for this declining aerial insectivore. In addition, we will model the spatiotemporal dynamics between local population trends of Tree Swallows and local changes in pesticide use across North America. We will also investigate how AI affects the life history, productivity and survival of bumblebee colonies, as well as assess if phenotypic plasticity in their morphology could help bumblebees mitigate the impacts of AI. Filling such knowledge gaps is necessary in order to improve our ability to predict where, when, and how evolutionary traps are more likely to occur and how their impacts can be avoided or mitigated.