Mechanisms underlying spatio-temporal fitness-landscape change

Characterize how fitness landscapes change across space and time and determine the biological mechanisms responsible for those changes.

Background

The paper develops fitness functions in which survival and reproduction have distinct optima and selection strengths. It argues that spatial or temporal variation in the strengths of selection can alter the shape and position of the composite adaptive landscape, even when the component-specific optima remain fixed. The authors identify understanding these spatio-temporal changes and their causes as a fundamental unresolved problem in evolutionary biology.

References

Understanding spatio-temporal fitness landscape changes and why they happen is a fundamental open problem in evolutionary biology.

— Novel models of trait evolution via an expansion of Lande's fitness function: The Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process meets the Little Prince's boa  (2608.20232 - Ponciano et al., 20 Aug 2026) in Non-specialist summary

Determining whether phylogenetic data contain sufficient information to distinguish shifts in effective optima driven by changing selection strengths from shifts driven by changing selective targets represents an important challenge for future comparative analyses.

— Novel models of trait evolution via an expansion of Lande's fitness function: The Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process meets the Little Prince's boa  (2608.20232 - Ponciano et al., 20 Aug 2026) in Discussion, final paragraph before “Conclusions”