Eco-Evolutionary Rescue of Fragmented Populations

Here I will establish eco-evolutionary rescue analyses as a predictive science.

I will do this by developing theories, principles and tools for assessing whether populations can cope with changes in the environment at both short (ecological) and long (evolutionary) timescales.

I contend that analyses involving the capacity of organisms to adapt to environmental changes must be based on theories including realistic ecological assumptions.

My aim is therefore to develop a common theoretical framework for analyses of eco-evolutionary dynamics that includes basic features that characterize almost all natural populations, such as stochastic fluctuations in population size, density-dependent feedback mechanisms and dispersal among geographically separate populations.

I will be able to achieve this ambitious goal because I have recently been involved in developing a new set of theories that have identified novel quantities based on general ecological characteristics that eco-evolutionary processes tend to maximize.

These provide objective measures of a population’s capacity to change, which can be used to assess the consequences of habitat loss and changes in environment variation such as those expected due to climate change.

I will be able to parameterize these models via my access to one of the largest individual-based long-term field studies of any vertebrate species including data of more than 36000 individual house sparrows from 18 populations on islands within a large geographical area of northern Norway, which will enable me to quantify processes rarely analysed before in natural populations.

A central focus will be to derive new metrics that describe how the degree of persistence of a population to environmental change depends upon its size and population dynamic characteristics.

Thus, this project will provide operationalization of eco-evolutionary rescue analyses as a research field for assessment of the vulnerability of species to global changes.