EEB Seminar: January 16th 2014

Eelke Jongejans will talk on

Tracing the effects of environmental drivers and phenotypic plasticity with hierarchical population models

at 12:30 in the EEB lounge (BioSciences 4338)

Individuals respond to different environments by developing different phenotypes, which is generally seen as a mechanism through which individuals can buffer adverse environmental conditions and increase their fitness. Understanding how life history variation is affected by resources and climate is crucial for predicting how such a species will respond to climate change in a heterogeneous landscape. To disentangle the effects of e.g. climate, habitat, resources and predation on the life history of species, hierarchical population models are developed in which the impact of environmental drivers, through traits and vital rates, on population growth can be explicitly traced with variance decomposition techniques.

Eelke Jongejans is a professor at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Broadly, Eelke is interested in how ecological and evolutionary processes influence population dynamics in space and time. Research in Eelke’s lab investigates how life-histories influence population dynamics in unstable environments, how phenotypic plasticity and rapid evolution allow organisms to respond to environmental change, and how population level processes, like density dependent selection, allow species to co-exist. Eelke approaches these questions using experimental, observational, and modeling techniques and has worked on a diversity of native and invasive plant species, aquatic invertebrates, fishes, birds, and mammalian carnivores.

Everyone is welcome to attend
Coffee and treats right after the seminar