Inheritance of Material Wealth in a Natural Population.

Evolutionary adaptation occurs when individuals vary in access to fitness-relevant resources and these differences in 'material wealth' are heritable. It is typically assumed that the inheritance of material wealth reflects heritable variation in the phenotypic abilities needed to acquire material wealth. We scrutinise this assumption by investigating additional mechanisms underlying the inheritance of material wealth in collared flycatchers.

A global database of soil seed bank richness, density, and abundance.

A soil seed bank is the collective name for viable seeds that are stored naturally in the soil. At the species or population level, the ability to form a seed bank represents a strategy for (re)colonization following a disturbance or other change in the local environmental conditions. At the community level, seed banks are thought to buffer local diversity during periods of environmental change and are often studied in relation to the potential for passive habitat restoration.

Unclear relationships between mean survival rate and its environmental variance in vertebrates.

Current environmental changes may increase temporal variability of life history traits of species thus affecting their long-term population growth rate and extinction risk. If there is a general relationship between environmental variances (EVs) and mean annual survival rates of species, that relationship could be used as a guideline for analyses of population growth and extinction risk for populations, where data on EVs are missing. For this purpose, we present a comprehensive compilation of 252 EV estimates from 89 species belonging to five vertebrate taxa (birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish) covering mean annual survival rates from 0.

Partitioning variance in population growth for models with environmental and demographic stochasticity.

How demographic factors lead to variation or change in growth rates can be investigated using life table response experiments (LTRE) based on structured population models. Traditionally, LTREs focused on decomposing the asymptotic growth rate, but more recently decompositions of annual 'realized' growth rates using 'transient' LTREs have gained in popularity. Transient LTREs have been used particularly to understand how variation in vital rates translate into variation in growth for populations under long-term study.

Role of weather and other factors in the dynamics of a low-density insect population.

Insect population dynamics are the result of an interplay between intrinsic factors such as density dependence, trophic web interactions, and external forces such as weather conditions. We investigate potential mechanisms of population dynamics in a natural, low-density insect population. Eggs and larvae of the noctuid moth, , develop on its host plant during summer.