This award will support US participation in a US-France workshop on causes, consequences and mechanisms of dispersal at the individual, population and community levels to take place in Roscoff, France, April 24 - May 1, 1999. Approximately 10 Americans and 15 Europeans, chiefly French scientists, will participate in the workshop. The aim of the proposed workshop is to discuss and merge the perspectives of scientists working on various aspects of dispersal. It will focus on (1) methods for studying dispersal; (2) the multiple causes of dispersal; (3) the behavioral mechanisms involved in dispersal; (4) the consequences of dispersal at the individual, population and species levels; and (5) perspectives for the study of dispersal in terms of gene flow and local adaptation.
Dispersal is an important survival behavior in response to environmental threats posed by habitat fragmentation and global climate change. The probability of a species surviving such changes is strongly dependent on its ability to tract shifts in the environment, either by moving between patches of habitat or by rapidly adapting to local conditions. The importance of this behavior to all species provides the motivation for this workshop. It is anticipated that the results of the workshop will lead to collaborations and future research in this area.
