Mini-symposium 7

Adaptation: merging ecological and evolutionary processes, from the individuals to macroscopic scale

The science of biodiversity currently faces the challenge of understanding how ecological processes shape evolutionary change, and reciprocally how evolution affects the structure and function of ecological systems. Such eco-evolutionary feedbacks can for example determine the dynamics of so-called adaptive trait-quantitative characters that are heritable yet mutable from parent to the offspring. They can also affect the population viability, especially for small populations where deleterious mutations accumulate faster.

The deep understanding of such feedbacks and its consequences necessitate to develop mathematical models based on the individual behaviors. From the individual level, can be derived macroscopic approximations depending on the different scales of the demographic or ecological parameters.

The goal of the symposium is to show the wealth of such point of view.

Invited speakers

Sylvain Billiard: Revisiting clonal interference: from competitive interactions between individuals to population dynamics and adaptation.

Nicolas Champagnat: The limit of small mutations in a stochastic individual-based model and the canonical equation of adaptive dynamics.

Organiser

Sylvie Méléard (Ecole Polytechnique, France).