Back to search

FRIMEDBIO-Fri prosj.st. med.,helse,biol

Early-life eco-evolutionary dynamics of variable seasonal migration

Alternative title: Øko-evolusjonær dynamikk i variabel sesongmigrasjon tidlig i livet

Awarded: NOK 12.0 mill.

Human-induced climate change and habitat alterations are radically altering the natural environments to which wild populations are currently adapted. Critical aims in ecology and evolutionary biology are therefore to understand how wild populations will respond to such changes by altering their behaviour and spatial ranges. One important behaviour that animals use to avoid temporary environmental deterioration is seasonal migration, meaning reversible movements between different locations as the seasons change. Our project aims to understand how quickly such migration, and resulting spatial and temporal population dynamics, could change as the environment changes. Migration could change through combinations of individual flexibility (termed ‘plasticity’), differential mortality of individuals that do and do not migrate (generating ‘natural selection’) and genetic inheritance. These processes have different implications for population structure and persistence, but have not yet been quantified in wild populations. We will combine twelve years of field data with advanced statistical and quantitative genetic analyses to investigate changing seasonal migration in a population of seabirds, the European shag (Phalacrocorax aristotelis), in Scotland. We will focus on plasticity, selection and inheritance occurring through the three pre-adult years of life, and thereby discover how early-life changes in migration can shape individual and population outcomes. By integrating our field results with new theoretical models, we will provide new insights into how ecological and evolutionary processes could jointly act to reshape population distributions and allow persistence given current rapid changes in seasonal environmental conditions.

Human impacts are radically altering the seasonal environments to which wild populations are currently adapted. Critical research aims are therefore to understand how individuals and populations will respond to such changes, and to predict resulting population persistence and spatial redistributions. Population responses will depend on complex interacting forms of i) genetic variation, ii) phenotypic plasticity (flexibility) and iii) natural selection in key traits that allow ‘escape’ from harsh seasonal environments. But, evolutionary ecologists have not yet considered key evolutionary properties of an ecologically critical trait that directly allows ‘spatial escape’: reversible seasonal migration. Hence, we do not yet understand how changing seasonality could rapidly alter the degree of seasonal movement and thereby profoundly reshape seasonal population dynamics and distributions. We will advance these current limits in population and evolutionary ecology by providing: 1) first empirical tests of key hypotheses explaining how interacting forms of early-life genetic variation, plasticity and selection can shape phenotypic variation in seasonal migration vs residence, and thereby alter spatio-seasonal population dynamics. We will achieve these ambitious aims by extending and applying cutting-edge statistical and quantitative genetic analyses to an exceptional large-scale multi-year field dataset on a partially migratory bird. 2) new general theory that examines how complex interacting forms of early-life genetic variation, plasticity and selection in seasonal migration can potentially ‘rescue’ declining populations experiencing changing forms of environmental seasonality, or else cause population collapse. We will thereby provide major new empirical and theoretical understanding of interacting ecological and evolutionary processes that could rapidly reshape spatio-seasonal population dynamics and distributions in the face of changing seasonal environments.

Publications from Cristin

No publications found

No publications found

No publications found

No publications found

Funding scheme:

FRIMEDBIO-Fri prosj.st. med.,helse,biol

Funding Sources