Range expansions into a heterogeneous world

In nature, populations expand into new habitat at different spatial and temporal scales.

The expansion process can thereby affect the evolutionary path of the growing population, a topic that gathered much interest recently. The effect of environmental heterogeneity on the evolutionary dynamics of such range expansions remains poorly understood so far - not least due to the large variety of environmental heterogeneity found in nature.

We study the effect of environmental heterogeneity or landscape structure using a combination of theory, simulations, and experiment using microbial model systems.

This talk will illustrate how evolutionary consequences of environmental heterogeneity can be predicted with principles borrowed from physics and illustrate the use of microbial model systems in this field.