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

未来几十年人类面临的最大挑战之一是理解和预测当前迅速而重要的环境变化的后果。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得到的关注相对较少。考虑到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，这一点令人惊讶。在这种背景下，有必要量化野生动物种群中多种性状的选择压力、定量遗传参数和表型可塑性如何随环境变化而变化。我认为，在一系列现实的环境条件下，使用多性状方法评估随时间和空间的进化和可塑性变化，是提高我们对自然种群进化和适应的理解的关键步骤。在接下来的五年里，我和我的学生将把生态学和进化理论与最先进的技术和详细的实地数据结合起来，结合分子生态学、定量遗传学和对单独标记的野生动物的长期监测。我们研究的短期目标是在反映不同生境质量的环境条件下，量化遗传结构、表型可塑性和作用于几个关键性状之间的选择压力。为了实现我们的主要研究目标，我和我的研究团队将获得来自两种鸟类（树燕和蓝山雀）和一种哺乳动物（东部花栗鼠）物种的特殊长期数据集。这三个系统都包括几千个有标记的个体，在许多代和不同的栖息地中获得了表型和亲缘关系的信息。我们的工作将有助于实现我的研究计划的长期目标，即揭示影响野生动物种群面对不断变化的环境条件的适应潜力的因素，并提供对选择的环境敏感性和适应的时空尺度的改进评估。我的项目旨在培养高素质的人才，并在我们对环境变化响应背后的模式和机制的理解方面取得重大进展。

One of the greatest challenges faced by mankind over the next decades is to understand and predict the consequences of the current rapid and important environmental changes. 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. In this context, there is thus a vital need to quantify how selective pressures, quantitative genetics parameters and phenotypic plasticity, for multiple traits in wild animal populations, may vary with changes in the environment. I suggest that assessing evolutionary and plastic changes over time and space, using multi-trait approaches, under a realistic range of environmental conditions are crucial steps toward improving our understanding of the evolution and adaptation of natural populations. Over the next five years, my students and I will integrate 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. The short term objectives of our research will be to quantify genetic architecture, phenotypic plasticity and selective pressures acting on and among several key traits, under environmental conditions reflecting different habitat quality. To achieve our main research objectives, my research team and I will have access to exceptional long-term data sets from two birds (Tree swallow and Blue tit) and one mammal (Eastern chipmunk) species. All three systems include several thousand marked individuals, with information on phenotypes and relatedness obtained over many generations and in contrasting habitats. Our work will help reaching the long term objectives of my research program which are to uncover the factors shaping the adaptive potential of wild animal populations facing changing environmental conditions and provide an improved assessment of the environmental sensitivity of selection and 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.