Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

For better or worse, humans are now considered the world's greatest evolutionary force in part by rapidly changing the natural environment. Anthropogenic changes include urbanization, invasive species, pollution, hunting and harvesting, and climate change. The overarching goal of my research is to understand how, when, and why organisms adapt to human influences. I am interested in how organisms adapt on human timescales, not over millennia. Understanding how organisms are adapting (or not) can help mitigate negative human impacts, identify positive human impacts, and inform conservation policy and management. Humans are changing the world at an unprecedented pace, so we need to understand global patterns of adaptation. A way to quantify whether and how organisms are adapting is to measure how fast traits are changing through time. I curate a unique database focused on such trait change rates that has over 9000 rates distributed across the globe. This database will be used to look at spatial patterns of trait change rates and how different human influences can affect these rates. Urbanization creates novel environments in which organisms must rapidly adapt to survive and persist. The effects of urbanization are often stronger on islands where populations of a species are small and geographically isolated. On the Galapagos Islands, urbanization is relatively new (< 150 years). I will research whether and how Darwin's finches, an iconic, endemic group of birds, are adapting to urbanization in `real time' by comparing urban and non-urban finches across four towns on four different islands. This research will help inform conservation and management efforts of organisms in urban environments. Another important human influence is domestication of animals. Trinidadian guppies have been domesticated for the aquarium trade and have been selectively bred to be extremely bright and colourful. When a trait like colour is strongly selected, linked traits could also change. Therefore, domestic and wild guppies could differ in other important traits, but this has never been studied. Both domestic and wild guppies have been introduced back into nature, and they are now an invasive species worldwide. As invasive species, guppies have a negative ecological impact, yet because we do not know how domesticated and wild guppies differ, we do not know how their ecological impacts might differ. This research will help inform aquatic management and broaden our knowledge of the effects of domestication. I take a multi-pronged approach, directly integrating new data from these two iconic research systems (Darwin's finches and Trinidadian guppies) and continuing to expand and curate the database of trait change rates. These inform both global and local patterns of trait changes in response to different human influences whose impacts and severity will only increase with time, including here in Canada.