Suzanne Bonamour

Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle · Adaptations du Vivant

The phenology of many species shows strong sensitivity to climate change; however, with few large scale intra-specific studies it is unclear how such sensitivity varies over a species’ range. We document large intra-specific variation in phenological sensitivity to temperature using laying date information from 67 populations of two co-familial Eur...

Earlier phenology induced by climate change, such as the passerines’ breeding time, is observed in many natural populations. Understanding the nature of such changes is key to predict the responses of wild populations to climate change. Genetic changes have been rarely investigated for laying date, though it has been shown to be heritable and under...

While earlier reproduction in a great tit population is expected to help with warmer springs, oak tree health seems to influence their ability to modulate their breeding period.

Although it has been shown that phenology can respond to temporal environmental variation in free ranging populations of several species, little is known about the mechanisms of these responses and their effects on demography, and in particular on survival. Exploring phenological responses and their associated consequences on survival can be achiev...

Life‐history traits are often plastic in response to environmental factors such as temperature or precipitation, and they also vary with age in many species. Trait variation during the lifetime could thus be partly driven by age‐dependent plasticity in these traits. We study whether plasticity of a phenological trait—the egg‐laying date—with respec...

Phenotypic plasticity – the expression by a single genotype of different phenotypes according to the environment – is ubiquitous in nature. Changes in phenology through plastic modulations are currently one of the main responses to climate change in the wild. Despite allowing adaptive and fast responses to environmental variation in the past, pheno...

Phenotypic plasticity is a major mechanism of response to global change. However, current plastic responses will only remain adaptive under future conditions if informative environmental cues are still available. We briefly summarize current knowledge of the evolutionary origin and mechanistic underpinnings of environmental cues for phenotypic plas...

Observed phenotypic responses to selection in the wild often differ from predictions based on measurements of selection and genetic variance. An overlooked hypothesis to explain this paradox of stasis is that a skewed phenotypic distribution affects natural selection and evolution. We show through mathematical modelling that, when a trait selected...