Ecological genomics of population persistence and adaptation to environmental change in fishes

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Rapid environmental changes predicted by climate models will impact the global distribution and abundance of species, highlighting the urgency to understand and predict how populations will persist, adapt or perish under changing environments. The long-term objective of my research program is to understand how genetic variation enables organisms to persist in their environment and adapt to environmental change. My research group tackles this by focusing on the proximate (genetic/epigenetic mechanisms) and ultimate (strength/agent of selection) causes of evolutionary change to explain how genes interact with the environment, using a combination of field and lab experiments that integrate genomics in natural populations of fishes to achieve this objective. Temperature is a predominant environmental factor affecting the distribution and abundance of organisms and as an "abiotic master factor" influences physiology, behaviour, and plasticity (the capacity for an individual genotype to express different phenotypes in response to environmental variation) of temperature-associated traits. Many species are particularly vulnerable to climate change because of their reliance on environmental temperature. Yet, for many studies that have recorded evolutionary changes in natural populations and attributed them to climate change, it has proven difficult to distinguish the role of phenotypic plasticity in putatively evolving traits. Our research program will test specific hypotheses about the ecological genomics and evolution of phenotypic plasticity in association with temperature variation in fishes to better predict their future abundance and distribution. Within this framework, we will use threespine stickleback to investigate the following short-term objectives over the next five years of our research program: (1) test the evolutionary predictions of plasticity-mediated population persistence and adaptive phenotypic plasticity and use gene expression and DNA sequencing to elucidate the underlying mechanisms contributing to these processes, (2) test predictions about the role of early life temperature stressors on the expression of future phenotypic plasticity and consequences for performance in the environment, (3) determine the effects of multiple stressors on the evolution of phenotypic plasticity and its corresponding impact on predicted species distribution ranges, and (4) determine the functional role of alleles associated with phenotypic plasticity with emerging genome editing methods. We will produce impactful data using an integrative approach to evaluate the role of phenotypic plasticity in evolutionary resilience and adaptation to global temperature changes. Collectively, our hope is that advances in our research will contribute to an understanding of how wild populations persist and evolve in the face of changing environments, and inform policy by improving the accuracy of predicted species distributions under climate change models.