The project investigates how environmental change generates a phenotypic response through evolutionary and ecological processes. The project aims are to understand how environment-driven selection and inherent fitness variation between individuals simultaneously alter the evolutionary response to environmental change. This project uses colour polymorphic tawny owls in the wild to get novel insight in how documented morph-specific climate-driven survival selection is coupled with simultaneous rapid micro-evolutionary change in morph frequency. Experiments in captivity and in the wild are used to understand mechanisms of selection and integrated population dynamical modelling to simultaneously model evolutionary and ecological processes contributing to phenotypic change. Spatial consequences of the processes are studied on national and Europe-wide scale. The results improve our knowledge of how phenotypic variation is maintained and how organisms adapt to environmental (climate) change.

2017

2022