Species that inhabit Northern latitudes are expected to experience dramatic climate changes in the coming century, and both basic and applied scientists need information about the effect of these changes on living natural resources. This project will produce useful statistical tools and baseline data for long-term population monitoring and management, and deliver important information regarding the ability of wildlife to persist in a changing landscape. One PhD student will be trained through this research, and will communicate results to collaborating public lands agencies for direct application to defining management units, modeling future distribution and abundance of wildlife populations, and planning for potential species range shifts. Results will also be broadly disseminated through public forums including invited speaking events, professional meetings, public radio, and school presentations.
When climate and landscape patterns change beyond an organism's physiological threshold, the options for persistence of that population are limited to adaptation or migration. Reliable identification of genes underlying signatures of natural selection is a necessary component of detecting the spatial scale at which adaptation to local conditions occurs, and provides critical information for understanding evolution and population resilience. However, the relative sensitivity of statistical tests to detect selection has not been rigorously examined, even less so for populations in natural landscapes. This project investigates the accuracy and precision of our ability detect local adaptation in naturally occurring populations at both smaller, landscape level scales, and broader, species-level scales. A combination of computer simulations and empirical information from novel genetic techniques will facilitate investigation of the influence of environmental variation, different population sizes, and migration rates on local adaptation of a northern alpine wild sheep throughout its range.
