Adaptation & Environment
Group Coordinator: Dr. Steve Willis
Our Research Discussion Group aims to understand the relationships between organisms and their changing environment, working at scales from global (range changes) to sub-cellular (genetic traits), whilst considering also behavioural and evolutionary plasticity.
The Adaptation & Environment Research Discussion Group is a forum for biologists interested in studying the relationships between organisms and their environment, whether these relationships apply to individual organisms, populations or species. The primary interests of the group are in the role of evolution in shaping species relationships with their environment, the role of behaviour in modifying individual variation, and the impact of environmental change, particularly global climatic change and anthropogenic habitat alteration, on species.
Studying the past provides one means of testing models that predict the future. As a result, there is a great deal of interest within the group in historical modelling of species ranges and population structure.
To inform the development of biodiversity conservation strategies resilient to climatic change (and the many other pressures causing biodiversity loss), we apply simulation models to predict the impacts of such changes on biodiversity. Statistical and mechanistic models, especially spatially and/or temporally explicit models of ecological and evolutionary processes, are being developed and applied to make robust predictions of the responses of species and ecosystems to environmental change. Studies of key ecosystem and land-surface processes are used to improve regional estimates of land-surface-atmosphere fluxes of gases, such as CO2, and relationships between genetic diversity, genetic drft, fitness and local adaptation are used to define evolutionarily significant units for conservation.
Staff
Academic Staff
- Dr Robert Baxter
- Dr John Bothwell
- Dr Tony Fawcett
- Dr PJ Gates
- Professor AR Hoelzel
- Professor B. Huntley
- Professor Marc Knight
- Dr Heather Knight
- Prof Steve Lindsay
- Dr Martyn Lucas
- Dr Shane A. Richards
- Dr A Smertenko
- Dr Philip Stephens
- Dr SD Twiss
- Dr Stephen G Willis