Eco-evolutionary dynamics result when interacting biological forces simultaneously produce demographic and genetic population responses. Eco-evolutionary simulators traditionally manage complexity by minimizing the influence of spatial pattern on process. However, such simplifications can limit their utility in real-world applications. We present a novel simulation modeling approach for investigating eco-evolutionary dynamics, centered on the driving role of landscape pattern. Our spatially-explicit, individual-based mechanistic simulation approach overcomes existing methodological challenges, generates new insights, and paves the way for future investigations in four focal disciplines: Landscape Genetics, Population Genetics, Conservation Biology, and Evolutionary Ecology. We developed a simple individual-based model to illustrate how spatial structure drives eco-evo dynamics. By making minor changes to our landscape’s structure, we simulated continuous, isolated, and semi-connected landscapes, and simultaneously tested several classical assumptions of the focal disciplines. Our results exhibit expected patterns of isolation, drift, and extinction. By imposing landscape change on otherwise functionally-static eco-evolutionary models, we altered key emergent properties such as gene-flow and adaptive selection. We observed demo-genetic responses to these landscape manipulations, including changes in population size, probability of extinction, and allele frequencies. Our model also demonstrated how demo-genetic traits, including generation time and migration rate, can arise from a mechanistic model, rather than being specified a priori. We identify simplifying assumptions common to four focal disciplines, and illustrate how new insights might be developed in eco-evolutionary theory and applications by better linking biological processes to landscape patterns that we know influence them, but that have understandably been left out of many past modeling studies.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.