På svenska
Applied genomic ecology
Global climate change, habitat destruction and landscape alterations, nutrient overloading, the spread of harmful and exotic species (including diseases), conservation of biodiversity, and population management are all problems where ecological and evolutionary genomics come into play. Global climate change, one of the major environmental issues of today, will regardless of its cause change the distribution and dispersal patterns of many organisms. Climate change also changes landscape structure and habitat composition. This in turn, creates ecological and evolutionary opportunities for exotic species invasions, the loss of native fauna and flora, and altered rules for species coexistence. Genomic ecology can reveal how such processes take place, whether they will be reversible or not, and how we can manage populations, communities, and habitats, to mitigate undesired changes and potential losses of biodiversity or resilience capacity.
A species’ dispersal capacity and the resulting gene flow between populations is one of the key characteristics that will predict its success in a changing world. Recently developed molecular genetic tools in combination with advanced statistical models have contributed with fundamentally new ways to measure dispersal and gene flow. At one end of the spectrum are rapidly spreading invasive species that can form globally panmictic populations. At the other end there is an increasing list of endangered species with small populations. In the latter case, matings between relatives are often unavoidable, resulting in inbreeding that may contribute to further population decline and extinction. It has therefore become a key objective for conservation geneticists to monitor genetic variation and occurrence of inbreeding in threatened populations.
Page Manager: Inger Ekström
Webmaster: Michael Sellers
Publisher: Department of Ecology
Last modified 29 Sep 2009
Avian malaria
Staffan
Bensch, Dennis Hasselquist, Helena Westerdahl, Lars Råberg
(Population ecology)
Niclas Jonzén (Theoretical
ecology)
Inbreeding
Staffan Bensch, Dennis Hasselquist, Bengt Hansson (Population ecology)
Glenn Svensson (Pheromone group)
Harmful algal blooms
Karin Rengefors (Phytoplankton ecology)
Staffan Bensch (Population ecology)
Per Lundberg (Theoretical ecology)