Representative research areas
Evolutionary ecology of desert organisms
Climate changes raised concerns for species’ survival and biodiversity loss throughout the world. But species can cope with environmental changes by adaptation, range shifts and survival in suitable refugia. It can be traced by testing adaptive responses, reconstructing population histories and by investigating species and community sensitivity to environmental alterations. In our research (BIODESERTS) we use desert organisms, primary from North Africa, to test how extreme and fluctuating conditions affect ecology and evolution. I develop projects using genetics, genomics, ecological modeling and remote sensing techniques on wild Sahara-Sahel rodents, as model organisms. This work has been mainly done in collaboration with José Carlos Brito, João Carlos Campos, Laurent Granjon and Abdeljebbar Qninba.
Evolutionary responses to ionizing radiation in the wild
How organisms response to stress, in otherwise natural condition, is an imperative problem in currently changing World. The Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents (but also e.g. post uranium excavation sites in Portugal) provide unique opportunities to explore the eco-evolutionary impacts of chronic exposure to low-dose radioactive contaminants on wild animals and plants. In this work we integrate the molecular genetics/genomic tools with physiological, behavioral and population experimental approaches. For the first time a large-scale, multi-generational field experiments, has been established to test micro-evolutionary changes and adaptations in a wild populations of a mammal. This work is developed with Tapio Mappes, Phill Watts, Anders Møller, Timothy Mousseau, Gennadi Milinevsky and Eugene Tukalenko.
Quantitative genetics and selection on metabolic rates
Life-history and reproductive characters are costly, however these costs in the form of energy usage have been poorly studied. More importantly, there is considerable controversy in assuming correlations between fitness and metabolic traits in animals. In this work we are conducting field and laboratory experiments to determine if and how life-histories and fitness are related to metabolic rate. My first research on natural selection, fitness and metabolic rate was developed under supervision of Paweł Koteja. This work evolved to test behavioural consequences of variation in metabolic rate, with Klára Šíchová and Petra Lantová, and to verify genetic architecture of fitness traits, with Tarmo Ketola. Currently this work is developed with Tapio Mappes and Esa Koskela.
