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COGPOP
Cognitive buffer and Population Persistence under Environmental Change
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The persistence of a population depends on the adjustment of the phenotype to the environment. If this changes, maladaptation can reduce the fecundity and survival of individuals, putting the persistence of the population at risk. It has long been known that the life strategy of the organism conditions the impact of these changes. However, the ability of life history theory to predict extinction risk remains limited, in part because it ignores that some organisms can modify the pressures that affect them through the decisions they make. The COGPOP project seeks to better integrate behavior into this theory, combining macroevolutionary analyses of birds and mammals, and long-term studies in a corvid —the jackdaw— to better understand how individuals' decisions affect population demography and evolution.
The life history theory, which explains how organisms distribute their time and energy between growing, reproducing, and surviving, is key to predicting how global change affects biodiversity, since the persistence of populations depends on the reproductive success and survival of their individuals. However, the capacity of this theory to predict the risk of extinction in animals remains limited. At COGPOP, we advocate for a more inclusive theory that integrates behaviour into life-history theory in order to better understand how animals face environmental changes.
Based on the Cognitive buffer hypothesis, which considers animals as active agents that shape external pressures through their decisions, our project aims to explore the adaptive role of decision-making in dealing with maladaptation.
To achieve this objective, we propose an integrative approach that combines species-specific studies with comparative analyses across multiple species.
The first focuses on the functional role of plastic decision-making in a bird with high cognitive capacity, the jackdaw (Corvus monedula), and we ask how the decisions made by individuals influence their reproductive success and population persistence. Long-term monitoring of populations in southern and northern Europe will be combined with field observations, new monitoring technologies, experimental trials, and molecular analyses to explore key decisions related to reproduction, the role of learning, and the adaptive potential to face climate change.
The second approach is retrospective and focuses on investigating the link between decision-making and the evolution of life histories in bird and mammal species. Based on new adaptive evolutionary models, we investigate how invasions of new niches have contributed to diversifying life strategies, and we ask how this has affected the evolution of body and brain. By integrating prospective and retrospective approaches, COGPOP seeks to advance toward a more general theory of how animal life history affects their response to environmental changes.
Proyecto PID2023-152973NB-I00 financiado por MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 y por FEDER, UE :
