Mini-symposium 5

Adaptation in a changing environment

Adaptation lies at the heart of Darwinian evolution. Natural populations are constantly faced with environmental changes that force them to either adapt or go extinct, a problem that is aggravated by human-induced global change. Therefore, increasing our understanding of the adaptive process is important for both basic and applied research, and both empirical and theoretical studies have made important progress in the past two decades.

Empirically, it has become clear that evolutionary change can be fast enough to be directly observable and to affect the demography of populations and communities. This has led to a flurry of research on "eco-evolutionary dynamics" and the possibility of "evolutionary rescue" of endangered species. Other work has focussed on the genetic basis of the adaptive process. While genomic approaches often focus on identifying quantitative-trait loci under selection, other studies have proceeded to measure key aspects of the genotype-phenotype map, such as the degree of pleiotropy and epistasis. Finally, previously elusive concepts such as the adaptive landscape are becoming increasingly empirically accessible, and experimental evolution allows the direct observation of adaptive trajectories. Accommodating these new data and results requires the development of theoretical models that go beyond traditional population- and quantitative-genetic approaches by focusing on adaptation in high-dimensional phenotype- and genotype spaces in a specific ecological context.

The aim of this symposium is to present recent theoretical advances in the study of adaptation in a changing environment and discuss how these connect and help to explain the phenomena observed in natural populations. The invited speakers will present results about genetic constraints on adaptation in changing environments, evolutionary rescue in structured populations, and how epistasis and natural selection shape the mutational architecture of complex traits. Contributed talks and posters are invited that include - but are not limited to - studies of adaptation using Fisher's geometric model and similar approaches, studies of the nature of genetic variation and the evolution of the G-matrix, and models of eco-evolutionary dynamics and evolutionary rescue.

Invited speakers

Reinhard Bürger: Epistasis, mutational architecture, and the response to selection of complex traits.

Luis-Miguel Chevin: Stochastic evolutionary demography under a fluctuating optimum phenotype.

Organisers

Sebastian Matuszewski (U Vienna) and Michael Kopp (Aix Marseille U).