Perspectives from animal demography on incorporating evolutionary mechanism into plant population dynamics

Abstract

With a growing number of longterm, individualbased data on natural populations, it has become increasingly evident that environmental change affects populations through complex, simultaneously occurring demographic and evolutionary processes. Analyses of populationlevel responses to environmental change must therefore integrate demography and evolution into one coherent framework. Integral projection models (IPMs), which can relate genetic and phenotypic traits to demographic and populationlevel processes, offer a powerful approach for such integration. However, a rather artificial division exists in how plant and animal population ecologists use IPMs. Here, I argue for the integration of the two subdisciplines, particularly focusing on how plant ecologists can diversify their toolset to investigate selection pressures and ecoevolutionary dynamics in plant population models. I provide an overview of approaches that have applied IPMs for ecoevolutionary studies and discuss a potential future research agenda for plant population ecologists. Given an impending extinction crisis, a holistic look at the interacting processes mediating population persistence under environmental change is urgently needed.