Towards a unified biology of populations: Integrating ecology, evolution,
and demography
Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology, Montpellier, France
Date: August 19-22, 2018
Abstract submission deadline: January, 15 2018
Conference website: http://evolutionmontpellier2018.org/
We are currently soliciting abstracts for oral and poster presentations
during our symposium at the upcoming joint meeting of societies for the
study of evolutionary biology. In particular, we encourage researchers that
would not typically go to an evolution-focused meeting in an effort to
assemble a broad collection of presentations. The aim of the symposium is to
challenge researchers to increase the cross-links among a diversity of
research topics covering the empirical and theoretical challenges to
measure, analyze, and predict the demographic and phenotypic characteristics
of populations and how these change in response to both ecological and
evolutionary forces.
Symposium Abstract:
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
Symposium Organizers: Ron Bassar, Timothée Bonnet, Erik Postma,
Matthew Wolak
