Olivier Cotto

French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) | INRAE · Plant Health Institute of Montpellier

Dispersal syndromes describe the patterns of covariation of morphological, behavioural, and life-history traits associated with dispersal. Studying dispersal syndromes is critical to understanding the demographic and genetic consequences of movements. Among studies describing the association of lifehistory traitswithdispersal, there is anecdotal ev...

Many species facing climate change have complex life cycles, with individuals in different stages differing in their sensitivity to a changing climate and their contribution to population growth. We use a quantitative genetics model to predict the dynamics of adaptation in a stage-structured population confronted with a steadily changing environmen...

Most natural environments vary stochastically and are temporally autocorrelated. Previous theory investigating the effects of environmental autocorrelation on evolution mostly assumed that total fitness resulted from a single selection episode. Yet organisms are likely to experience selection repeatedly along their life, in response to possibly dif...

Anticipating and preparing for the effect of environmental changes on biodiversity requires to understand and predict both the ecological and evolutionary responses of populations. Tools and methods to efficiently integrate these complex processes are lacking. We present the genetically and spatially explicit individual‐based simulation software Ne...

The distribution of fitness effects (DFE) of new mutations is key to our understanding of many evolutionary processes. Theoreticians have developed several models to help understand the patterns seen in empirical DFEs. Many such models reproduce the broad patterns seen in empirical DFEs but these models often rely on structural assumptions that can...

Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits subject to stabilizing selection around an optimal phenotype, whose value is shifted continuously through time. In t...

Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits subject to stabilizing selection around an optimal phenotype, whose value is shifted continuously through time. In t...

The strength of mate choice (choosiness) often varies with age, but theory to understand this variation is scarce. Additionally, theory has investigated the evolution of choosiness in speciation scenarios but has ignored that most organisms have overlapping generations. We investigate whether speciation can result in variation of choosiness with ag...

Mate choice is a crucial element of many processes in evolutionary biology. Empirical research has shown that mating preference and choosiness often change with age. Understanding the evolutionary causes of patterns of age‐specific choosiness is challenging because different mechanisms can give rise to the same pattern. Instead of focusing on the o...

Many natural populations exhibit temporal fluctuations in abundance that are consistent with external forcing by a randomly changing environment. As fitness emerges froman interaction between the phenotype and the environment, such demographic fluctuations probably include a substantial contribution from fluctuating phenotypic selection.We study th...

In recent years, theoretical models have introduced the concept that ongoing hybridization between “good” species can occur because incomplete reproductive isolation can be a selected optimum. They furthermore show that positive frequency-dependent sexual selection, which is naturally generated by some of the underlying processes that lead to assor...

Withstanding extinction while facing rapid climate change depends on a species' ability to track its ecological niche or to evolve a new one. Current methods that predict climate-driven species' range shifts use ecological modelling without eco-evolutionary dynamics. Here we present an eco-evolutionary forecasting framework that combines niche mode...

Supplementary Figures, Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Tables, and Supplementary References

In this study, we use a quantitative genetics model of structured populations to investigate the evolution of senescence in a variable environment. Adaptation to local environments depends on phenotypic traits whose optimal values vary with age and with environmental conditions. We study different scenarios of environmental heterogeneity, where the...

Abstract Abundant empirical evidence for dispersal syndromes contrasts with the rarity of theoretical predictions about the evolution of life-history divergence between dispersing and philopatric individuals. We use an evolutionary model to predict optimal differences in age-specific reproductive effort between dispersing and philopatric individual...

Previous models have predicted that when mortality increases with age, older individuals should invest more of their resources in reproduction and produce less dispersive offspring, as both their future reproductive value and their prospect of competing with their own sib decline. Those models assumed stable population sizes. We here study for the...