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Workshop 3: Spatial Heterogeneity in Biotic and Abiotic Environment: Effects on Species Ranges, Co-evolution, and Speciation (February 6-10, 2006)

Organizers: Sergey Gavrilets, Mark Kirkpatrick, and John Thompson

Most biological organisms face biotic and abiotic environments that are spatially heterogeneous across their species ranges. Traditionally, the theoretical studies of the evolutionary consequences of this heterogeneity have concentrated mostly on the conditions for establishment of locally adapted genotypes and on the maintenance of genetic variation across the whole species.

Recently, the interest and emphasis have begun to shift towards biological questions concerning larger scale effects. For example, one important question is about the effects of the immigration of locally deleterious genes on the degree of local adaptation and the ability of species to expand their ranges. Answering this question has implications for the origin and maintenance of biodiversity. Also, the co-evolutionary roles played by organisms can vary substantially across their species ranges, which can result in complex geographic mosaic of co-evolutionary interactions and rapid changes in local populations. The interactions of spatially heterogeneous selection, the limitation of mating possibilities caused by isolation-by-distance, and the evolution of genetically-based mating preferences can result in splitting the initial population into reproductively isolated populations, i.e., in parapatric speciation. The development of adequate population genetic models of parapatric speciation is necessary to guide the development of statistical methods and hypotheses using emerging genomics data to infer the history of speciation in specific groups of biological organisms.

The complexity of the evolutionary dynamics driven by ecological and co-evolutionary interactions in a spatially explicit context requires the development of modeling approaches that are both sophisticated and realistic. This will hardly be possible without genuinely cross-disciplinary interactions. This workshop will bring together physicists, mathematicians, and theoretical and empirical biologists in an attempt to initiate and simplify such interactions.