Drivers of life history strategies

Short- or long-lived? Fast- or slow-growing? Semelparous or iteroparous? High- or low-quality/quantity offspring producer? Those are (some of) the questions… that have occupied evolutionary biologists working in natural settings for decades. What combinations of life history traits and emergent life history strategies are best suited to cope with current and projected environments?

maria paniw presents our recent paper on vulnerability of animal and plant species to climate change credit r salguero gomez

The SalGo Team has developed a series of frameworks to classify organisms (from bacteria to humans, to sequoias and everything in between) based on their life history strategies. From these, we are now exploring how the pace of life, continuum of senescence (below) and mode of reproduction allow species to deal with environmental stochasticity. We work together with big data researchers and climate scientists to draw global predictions on biodiversity change before various IPCC scenarios.

SalGo team members:

  • Sarah Bull
  • Aldo Compagnoni
  • James Cant
  • Sam Gascoigne
  • Sam Levin
  • Roberto Rodriguez
  • Rob Salguero-Gómez
  • Ollie Spacey

Selected collaborators:

Selected publications:

Rodriguez-Caro R, Graciá E, Blomberg S, Cayuela H, Grace M, Carmona C, Pérez-Mendoza H, Giménez A, Salguero-Gómez R. 2023. Anthropogenic impacts on threatened species erode functional diversity in turtles and crocodilians. Nature Communications 14, 1542 DOI 10.1038/s41467-023-37089-5

Salguero-Gómez R. 2021. Commentary on the life history special issue: The fast-slow continuum is not the end-game of life history evolution, human or otherwise. Evolution and Human Behavior 42: 281-283  DOI 10.1016/j.evolhumbehaf.2021.03.005

Compagnoni A, Levin S, Childs D, Harpole S, Paniw M, Römer G, Burns J, Che-Castaldo J, Rüger N, Kunstler G, Bennett J, Archer R, Salguero-Gómez R* & Knight T*. 2021. Herbaceous perennial plants with short generation time have stronger responses to climate anomalies than those with longer generation time. Nature Communications 12, 1824 DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-21977-9

Capdevila P, Beger M, Blomberg S, Hereu B, Linares C & Salguero-Gómez R. 2020. Longevity, body dimension and reproductive mode drive differences in aquatic versus terrestrial life history strategies. Functional Ecology 34, 1613-1625 DOI 10.1111/1365-2435.13604

Healy K, Ezard T, Jones O, Salguero-Gómez R* & Buckley Y*. 2019. Beyond the fast-slow continuum in animal life-histories. Nature Ecology & Evolution 3, 1217-1224 DOI: 10.1038/s41559-019-0938-7

Paniw M, Ozgul A, Salguero-Gómez R. 2018. Interactive life-history traits predict sensitivity of plants and animals to temporal autocorrelation. Ecology Letters 21, 275-286, DOI: 10.1111/ele.12892

Salguero-Gómez R. 2017. Applications of the fast-slow continuum & reproductive strategy framework of plant life histories. New Phytologist 4: 1618-1624 Tansley Early Career Medal finalist, DOI: 10.1111/nph.14289

Salguero-Gómez R, Jones OR, Jongejans E, Blomberg S, Hodgson D, Mbeau Ache C, Zuidema PA, de Kroon H* & Buckley Y*. 2016. The fast-slow continuum and reproductive strategies structure plant life history variation worldwide. PNAS 113, 230-235. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1506215112

 

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