Dear colleagues,

don’t forget today’s Biology Thursday seminar, 24^th March, 12:15 (on zoom, link below), with

Dr. Marjo Saastamoinen (HiLIFE Associate Professor in Evolutionary Ecology, University of Helsinki) on

Impact of human-induced environmental change on natural populations – butterflies as a model system

Natural populations are increasingly challenged by environmental stress induced by humans. However, as environmental variation is common in nature, species often harbour adaptive strategies that may mitigate negative impacts. Whether existing strategies to deal with environmental variation also benefit individuals and populations under on-going environmental change and more novel stressors remains unknown. To address these questions, we are utilizing the Glanville fritillary butterfly as a study organism and effectively couple laboratory and field based studies with long-term demographic and environmental data and analyses. I will present some recent work assessing the impact of extensive summer drought on individual and population level responses, and discuss whether plasticity and behavioural modifications in habitat use and thus spatial habitat heterogeneity mitigates negative impacts of more extreme events. I will finish my talk with an analyses assessing temporal shifts in phenology and spatial shifts in northern range boundaries due to climate change by using long-term data for 289 Lepidoptera species sampled over two decades in Finland. We show that even though a combination of phenology and range shifts is the most viable strategy under a changing climate, only a minority of species are able to use it. This may have large consequences on future community composition of Boreal Lepidoptera.

more on Marjo’s research at: https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/life-history-evolution

See you soon,

Heikki

Heikki Helanterä is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

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