Speaker
Description
Evolutionary change is rapid, ubiquitous, and increasingly documented across managed ecological systems. Yet management decisions are still largely formulated as if ecological systems were static, with targets focused on abundance, habitat area, or harvest rates while evolutionary responses are treated as background processes or unintended side effects. This mismatch generates predictable outcomes: resistance to control, harvest-induced life-history shifts, and trait erosion under habitat simplification. Such responses are not anomalies but consequences of altered selection pressures created by policy itself. We argue that conservation should be reframed explicitly as an evolutionary decision problem in which management actions reshape fitness landscapes and populations adapt accordingly. Whether adaptation ultimately leads to persistence (evolutionary rescue) or collapse (evolutionary suicide) depends on how trade-offs are structured and how interventions modify ecological constraints. Through conceptual and mathematical examples, we show that policies designed to stabilise populations can inadvertently reduce evolutionary resilience, and that relocating evolutionary costs across demographic parameters can qualitatively shift system outcomes, revealing eco-evolutionary tipping points. Framing conservation as a hierarchical, leader–follower interaction between policymakers and evolving systems provides a principled way to anticipate adaptive feedbacks, identify extinction boundaries, and design interventions that balance short-term ecological stability with long-term evolutionary robustness. Integrating such eco-evolutionary foresight into conservation practice is essential for managing adaptive systems in a rapidly changing world.
