S59. Towards a unified biology of populations: Integrating ecology, evolution and demography

Organizers: Ron Bassar, Timothée Bonnet, Erik Postma, Matthew Wolak

Individual variation in fitness is the outcome of a complex and dynamic interplay of genes, the environment and chance, and provides the raw material for natural selection. The concept of fitness is hence central to evolutionary biology in general, and to understanding the individual- and population-level consequences of environmental change in particular. Although fitness appears in the fundamental equations of both evolutionary genetics and population dynamics, attempts to predict changes in individual fitness and project these onto population growth rates are often unsuccessful. Indeed, such attempts to integrate evolution and demography face several major theoretical and empirical challenges. First, we lack a quantitative and comprehensive understanding of the role of both adaptive and non-adaptive evolution, phenotypic plasticity, and age/stage structure in shaping trait distributions in space and time. Furthermore, existing methods are poorly equipped to deal with the complexities inherent to most natural populations, including environmental change and degradation, frequency- and density-dependence, and the ‘hardness’ of selection. This symposium will assemble researchers that take innovative theoretical and empirical approaches to address the above challenges to bring us closer to the ultimate aim of a unification of evolutionary and population dynamics.

Invited speaker: Isabel Smallegange “The role of eco-evolutionary feedbacks in population dynamics: from alternative phenotype expression to demography and back”