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Symposium 20: Evolution on ecological time scales
Thursday, August 11, 1:30 PM - 5 PM, Meeting Room
517b, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Organizers: Andrew
Hendry (Andrew.Hendry@mcgill.ca), Denis Réale,
Gregor Fussmann
Description: Our world
is changing. Although temporally varying environments have always posed
challenges to organisms, these challenges are now more dramatic as the result of
human activities. Populations and species must respond to these challenges if
they are to persist. Ecologists have traditionally considered the impacts of
environmental change in the context of demography: changes in births and deaths.
Evolutionary changes, in contrast, are generally assumed to require much longer
time spans. This view is beginning to change in concert with recent evidence of
substantial evolutionary changes occurring over only a few generations. This
“contemporary evolution” has long been acknowledged for micro-organisms, but
has only recently been widely documented in long-lived species. Our goal is to
further expose ecologists to some exemplary model systems that demonstrate the
ecological relevance of contemporary evolution. The symposium will illustrate
how evolutionary changes on ecological time scales can have important
implications for the dynamics and persistence of populations and communities.
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