Individuals live among, compete with or sometimes cooperate with those around them. Together they form populations, which have properties beyond those of individuals. Populations are characterized by properties like age and sex composition, social organization, habitat distribution and genetic structure. Most of all it is only populations which have a variation in phenotypic and genetic traits among individuals. This variation together with natural selection forms the basis for adaptation. It is the study of this differential success among members as members of a population which defines population biology. In conservation biology the focus is how the proper function of populations is upset. Insufficient population growth and impoverished genetic variation as are two main objectives.
To address these questions we study within the program among other things local adaptation in life-history traits, the genetic structure of fragmented populations, the role of social structure for survival, fecundity, and eruptive population dynamics of mosquitoes. All these studies contain conservation aspects incorporating responses to man-caused environmental disturbances. We are studying these aspects through
- Field- and laboratory experiments
- Mapping of the genetic variation in extant and historical populations.
- Long-term studies of individual success in natural populations.
- Theoretical modeling
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climate to morphology have gained renewed interest because of climate change, yet few studies have evaluated to what extent geographical trends ascribed to these rules have a genetic, rather than environmentally determined, basis. This applies especially to Allen’s rule, which states that the relative extremity length decreases with increasing latitude. Alho et al. studied leg length in the common frog along a latitudinal gradient utilizing wild and common garden data. They found that leg length did not conform to Allen’s rule in the wild, but the common garden data revealed a genetic cline consistent with Allen’s rule. These results indicate that genetically based geographic clines in morphological traits can be influenced by environmental effects.
