CAM Colloquium - Yngvild Vindenes, Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, University of Oslo

Description

Title: How do organisms adapt to variable and unpredictable environments?

Abstract: Most organisms are adapted to live in variable environments, and two main modes of adaptation have been identified: Demographic buffering (reducing the variance of important vital rates such as survival probability and fecundity), and adaptive lability (mechanisms that allow increased survival or fecundity in rare, good environments). However, we do not have good understanding of how life histories combine these adaptive mechanisms. An important result from classical stochastic population models, Tuljapurkar’s approximation, demonstrated that increasing the temporal variance in (or positive covariance between) stage-specific vital rates has a negative effect on fitness. However, when explicit environmental drivers like temperature are considered, positive effects of increased variability are also possible due to non-linear vital rate responses responses. I will present an extension of Tuljapurkar's approximation of fitness to include such non-linearity. I use the result in theoretical comparative analyses to identify patterns in how species adapt to environmental variability through buffering and lability.

Short Bio: Yngvild Vindenes is Professor at the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis at the Unviersity of Oslo. She is interested in how individual variation in traits and life histories arise and influence ecological and evolutionary processes, including biological responses to climate change. She develops and analyzes mathematical and statistical models with application to observational and experimental data from different study systems.