Irja Ida Ratikainen
Researcher
Researcher
I am a researcher at the Gjærevoll Centre for Biodiversity Foresight Analyses and deputy director of the Centre for Biodiversity Forecasting (CBF), one of four nature centres funded by the Research Council of Norway (2026–2034).
My research focuses on how organisms adapt to variable and unpredictable environments, and what this means for how they cope with human-induced environmental change.
The climate is changing not only towards warmer and wetter conditions, but we also expect greater variability and unpredictability, such that more extreme environmental conditions should occur more frequently. Living organisms have evolved various ways to cope with such variable and uncertain environments, but more work is needed to understand whether these adaptations will be enough to cope with the upcoming increase in environmental unpredictability.
For example, organisms can try to buffer themselves against unpredictable poor conditions by storing fat or insulation, or by being more careful and conservative in how they spend their time and energy over their lifetime. Alternatively, organisms can try to be ready for a wider variety of environmental conditions by being generalists and utilising many different resources, or by producing lots of offspring with different properties so at least some will survive well and reproduce no matter what environmental conditions they encounter.
In my research group we build general theoretical models that can help us predict under which conditions organisms should show these different kinds of adaptations to variable and unpredictable environments. These include models of optimal life-history strategies, phenotypic plasticity and bet-hedging, including stochastic dynamic programming. We also use models to understand how single organisms can use several different kinds of adaptations and how these adaptations will interact with each other, perhaps over different evolutionary timescales.
On the empirical side, I study how hydropower regulation affects aquatic insect communities and their phenology, using regulated and natural Norwegian lakes as a natural experiment.
The aim is to understand adaptations well enough to predict how species and communities will respond to a changing environment, and thereby help with conservation and management of biodiversity.
I am a member of the Panel on Biodiversity of the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food and Environment (VKM), and subject editor for ecology and behavioural ecology in Store norske leksikon, the Norwegian online encyclopaedia.