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

我的研究项目旨在通过评估野生动物种群的进化潜力和表型可塑性来阐明影响它们适应环境条件变化的因素。不断增加的人口及其活动的扩大正在以前所未有的速度引起变化。然而，这些变化对产生和维持生物多样性的进化过程的影响相对较少受到关注。这是令人惊讶的，因为灭绝风险与物种的进化潜力及其表达适应性表型可塑性的能力密切相关。适应潜力低或适应不良或可塑性降低的物种在不断变化的环境中几乎没有机会持久。然而，几乎所有之前评估随时间或空间进化变化的研究都假设环境在研究期间保持不变。这一假设在我们对跨特征、种群和物种的可塑性和进化潜力的极限的理解中留下了一个空白。我认为，将环境变异性纳入进化遗传学模型是走向生态学和进化整合的迫切需要的一步，将提供对塑造和维持生物多样性的过程的更多了解。在接下来的五年里，我和我的学生们将把生态学和进化论理论与最先进的技术和详细的野外数据结合起来，结合分子生态学、数量遗传学和对个别标记的野生动物的长期监测。我们的研究将量化两个鸟类研究系统中几个个体性状的加性遗传方差和协方差以及表型可塑性，以评估不同环境条件和栖息地质量下选择压力对这些性状以及这些性状之间的影响。通过这样做，我们的工作将大大改善对选择的环境敏感性以及适应的空间和时间尺度的评估。我的计划旨在培训高素质的人员，并在我们对环境变化反应背后的模式和机制的理解方面取得重大进展。

My research program seeks to elucidate the factors shaping the adaptive potential of wild animal populations that face changing environmental conditions by assessing both their evolutionary potentials and their phenotypic plasticity. The increasing human population and the expansion of its activities are causing changes at an unprecedented rate. 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. Species with low adaptive potential or maladapted/reduced plasticity have little chance of persistence in a changing environment. Yet, almost all previous studies that assessed evolutionary change over time or space have assumed that the environment remains constant over the study period. That assumption has left a gap in our understanding of limits to plasticity and evolutionary potential across traits, populations, and species. I suggest that incorporating environmental variability in evolutionary genetics models is a much-needed step towards the integration of ecology and evolution and will provide a much greater understanding of the processes that shape and maintain biodiversity. Over the next five years, my students and I will combine 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. Our research will quantify additive genetic variance and covariance as well as phenotypic plasticity for several individual traits in two bird study systems, to assess how selective pressures act on and among those traits under different environmental conditions and habitat quality. By so doing, our work will provide a much-improved assessment of the environmental sensitivity of selection and of 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.