2012 Per Brinck Oikos Award

The 2012 laureate is Prof. Tim Coulson from Imperial College London for his timely and synthesizing work on linking ecological and evolutionary theory. Instead of treating individual variation in life history as noise, he is embracing individual variation and the mechanisms leading to it. By integrating this variation into models he developed novel theoretical approaches to predict ecological and evolutionary consequences of environmental change on life history, population dynamics and the distribution of quantitative characters and genotypes. In this issue, we publish Tim Coulson’s Per Brinck lecture in which he demonstrates the advantages of integral projection models for the understanding of eco-evolutionary dynamics ifin systems that cannot be easily replicated in the field. By this hands- on paper, Tim advocates the benefits of IPM’s to field biologists who may not have tried to construct models before but might be interested in doing so.

Original paper: Predicting food-web structure with metacommunity models