Causes and Consequences of Fluctuating Selection in a Stochastic Environment, 2015

In this project we will quantitatively examine the contribution of fluctuating selection at different ages and random drift to evolutionary changes of quantitative characters in house sparrows. We will achieve this by parameterizing stochastic age-specific selection models to predict the effects of fluctuating environments on the distribution of phenotypic characters both in time and space in a house sparrow metapopulation and by evaluating how the strength of selection is affected by experimental evaluations of the distribution of phenotypes. Based on these results we will provide a mechanistic understanding for how fluctuations in the environment can produce long-term changes in fitness-related quantitative traits. The data consists of eight tables in SQLformat and a log file for the number of rows.