A major challenge of evolutionary ecology over the next decades is to understand and predict the consequences of the current rapid and important environmental changes on wild populations. Extinction risk of species is linked to populations’ evolutionary potential and to their ability to express adaptive phenotypic plasticity. There is thus a vital need to quantify how selective pressures, quantitative genetics parameters, and phenotypic plasticity, for multiple traits in wild animal populations, may vary with changes in the environment. Here I review our previous research that integrated ecological and evolutionary theories with molecular ecology, quantitative genetics, and long‐term monitoring of individually marked wild animals. Our results showed that assessing evolutionary and plastic changes over time and space, using multi‐trait approaches, under a realistic range of environmental conditions are crucial steps toward improving our understanding of the evolution and adaptation of natural populations. Our current and future work focusses on assessing the limits of adaptive potential by determining the factors constraining the evolvability of plasticity, those generating covariation among genetic variance and selection, as well as indirect genetic effects, which can affect population's capacity to adjust to environmental changes. In doing so, we aim to provide an improved assessment of the spatial and temporal scale of evolutionary processes in wild animal populations.

中文翻译：

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自然和人为引起的环境变化及其对野生动物种群适应潜力的影响。


未来几十年进化生态学的一个主要挑战是了解和预测当前快速而重要的环境变化对野生种群的影响。物种灭绝风险与种群的进化潜力及其表达适应性表型可塑性的能力有关。因此，迫切需要量化野生动物种群多种性状的选择压力、定量遗传参数和表型可塑性如何随着环境的变化而变化。在这里，我回顾了我们之前的研究，将生态和进化理论与分子生态学、定量遗传学以及对单独标记的野生动物的长期监测相结合。我们的结果表明，在现实的环境条件下，使用多性状方法评估随时间和空间的进化和可塑性变化，是提高我们对自然种群进化和适应的理解的关键步骤。我们当前和未来的工作重点是通过确定限制可塑性进化的因素、遗传变异和选择之间产生协变的因素以及间接遗传效应来评估适应潜力的极限，这些因素可能会影响种群适应环境变化的能力。在此过程中，我们的目标是对野生动物种群进化过程的空间和时间尺度进行改进的评估。