Innovation Anthology #21: Senior Chemist, Advanced Materials
Throughout the boreal forest, wherever you find spruce trees, you’ll also find that little chatterbox, the red squirrel.
For almost two decades, University of Alberta ecologist Dr. Stan Boutin has studied successive generations of red squirrels in the southern Yukon.
Dr. Boutin and his research team have discovered that in response to climate warming, red squirrels are reproducing much earlier than usual. They now give birth on average 18 days earlier than they did ten years ago.
And Dr. Boutin is the first to demonstrate that climate change is driving genetic or evolutionary adaptation in animals.
SB: Given the change in the environment due to warmer temperatures, all of a sudden selection has operated to favour those females that breed earlier relative to those females that tend to breed later on average. So we’re just seeing a change in the frequency of these individuals in a population rather than some bizarre mutation that’s led to an earlier breeder, for example.
While this is evolution in the making, Dr. Boutin worries about the pace of climate warming and whether red squirrels have already reached the limits of their ability to adapt.
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY, I’M CHERYL CROUCHER.
Guest
John Payzant,
Alberta Research Council, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, payzant@arc.ab.ca
Sponsor
NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Integrated Landscape Management
The Integrated Landscape Management Chair is developing a toolkit for ecologically informed land use planning. At the heart of this toolkit is a suite of models capable of integrating multiple land use activities over large areas and long time scales to explore the future impacts of todays land use decisions. The models do this by linking human actions to indicators of ecological, economic, and social condition. They are constrained by their ability to adequately represent the dynamics of complex systems, and our current research emphasis aims to reduce the uncertainties over the impacts of invasive organisms on species at risk in Canadas boreal forest.
The ILM Chair is an initiative of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, with sponsors and collaborators in academia, government, and the private sector.
Program Date: 2007-03-27