Adaptation to rapid environmental changes: micro-evolutionary and plastic responses 

Understanding the rate at which adaptation occurs is crucial for predicting the viability of natural populations. If the rate of adaptation is too slow to track environmental changes, populations might face severe demographic consequences. Adaptation to a changing or novel environment may occur via micro-evolution, where genotypes that have a higher fitness increase in frequency in the population, and/or via phenotypic plasticity, where a genotype expresses a different phenotype under different environmental conditions. While plasticity is often studied as an adaptive response to climate (and global) change, micro-evolution is rarely examined, specially in wild populations.

The group's current research focuses on studying how rapidly changing environmental conditions influence adaptive responses in a wild population of common terns (Sterna hirundo). Our main trait of interest is phenology (i.e., timing of migration and of breeding), and we are interested in quantifying patterns of additive genetic variance and the strength of annual selection (Moiron et al., 2020 The American Naturalist, Moiron et al., 2022 Evolution), individual and genetic plasticity in response to environmental conditions (Moiron et al., 2022 OSF preprint), and the expected micro-evolutionary response to selection across environmental conditions (Moiron et al., 2023 Evolution Letters).