The workshops will take place in the morning of Friday 9 October.
Workshop 1 (09:00 - 10:00, 10:10 - 11:10)
Eco-evolutionary consequences of harvesting in a changing environment
Bart Peeters, Lara Veylit, Marlène Gamelon
Understanding the eco-evolutionary consequences of harvesting is important for sustainable management under climate change. Both harvesting and environmental variability affect population dynamics and can lead to evolutionary changes in life-history traits and demographic rates. However, disentangling effects of harvesting from density dependence and abiotic drivers is challenging, particularly when these processes interact. Individual long-term monitoring is usually implemented in wild populations that are not (or lightly) harvested, making it difficult to understand the relative effects of harvesting, density and climate change on individual fitness in heavily harvested populations. Currently, it is nearly impossible to draw general conclusions – at both intra- and interspecific levels, and from the individual to the community level – on the eco-evolutionary implications of harvesting in populations subject to climate change. In this workshop, we will discuss important knowledge gaps in our research and share conceptual ideas on how to fill them.
Workshop 2 (11:20 - 12:45)
Quantifying plastic and genetic responses to (multivariate) trait changes in communities
Lynn Govaert, Christophe Coste
The awareness that evolutionary changes can occur on time scales that are contemporary with ecological processes has increased the amount of studies on eco-evolutionary dynamics. One of the main questions in that field revolves around how relatively important evolution is compared to ecology when a trait shift occurs. Several methods have been developed to facilitate the answer to this question. In this workshop, we will give a brief overview on existing eco-evolutionary partitioning metrics, their underlying assumptions and how they differ. Next, we will open discussion on a set of different questions involving: (1) can we use these methods to quantify ecological and evolutionary contributions to trait change in complex communities; (2) can we include demographic processes into these methods; and (3) how can we incorporate multivariate trait change.
Workshop 3 (CANCELLED)
Males: what are the consequences of ignoring them (as demographers)?
Charlotte de Vries, Rob Salguero-Gomez, Hanna Kokko
There is a lack of communication between demographers and evolutionary biologist studying sexual conflict and its consequences. What could we gain by integrating insights across these disciplines? Sexual conflict is often (not always!) correlated with levels of sexual dimorphism (the more dimorphic, the more conflict). One consequence of sexual conflict is that a females-only population growth rate is not a good fitness proxy when males and females differ in their life histories. To justify ignoring males in demographic analyses, it is therefore important to know how much sexual dimorphism in survival and reproductive success there is. However, male demographic rates are rarely reported in population studies, even when they are measured, leading to a dearth of male data in open access demographic datasets like COMPADRE, COMADRE, PADRINO, and DATLife. Twelve species out of 423 animal species currently in COMADRE have data for males and females. Can we remedy this, and what more could be learned from such data? For example, what kind of data would be necessary to get an estimate of levels of sexual conflict in wild populations?
We will start the working group with some brief introductions on the concepts and knowledge gaps but the main idea of this working group will be to discuss and brainstorm together.
We will start the working group with some brief introductions on the concepts and knowledge gaps but the main idea of this working group will be to discuss and brainstorm together.