@article{FerTietjenJeltschetal.2017,
  author    = {Fer, Istem and Tietjen, Britta and Jeltsch, Florian and Trauth, Martin H.},
  title     = {Modelling vegetation change during Late Cenozoic uplift of the East African plateaus},
  series = {Palaeogeography, palaeoclimatology, palaeoecology : an international journal for the geo-sciences},
  volume    = {467},
  journal   = {Palaeogeography, palaeoclimatology, palaeoecology : an international journal for the geo-sciences},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {Amsterdam},
  issn      = {0031-0182},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.04.007},
  pages     = {120 -- 130},
  year      = {2017},
  abstract  = {The present-day vegetation in the tropics is mainly characterized by forests worldwide except in tropical East Africa, where forests only occur as patches at the coast and in the uplands. These forest patches result from the peculiar aridity that is linked to the uplift of the region during the Late Cenozoic. The Late Cenozoic vegetation history of East Africa is of particular interest as it has set the scene for the contemporary events in mammal and hominin evolution. In this study, we investigate the conditions under which these forest patches could have been connected, and a previous continuous forest belt could have extended and fragmented. We apply a dynamic vegetation model with a set of climatic scenarios in which we systematically alter the present-day environmental conditions such that they would be more favourable for a continuous forest belt in tropical East Africa. We consider varying environmental factors, namely temperature, precipitation and atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Our results show that all of these variables play a significant role in supporting the forest biomes and a continuous forest belt could have occurred under certain combinations of these settings. With our current knowledge of the palaeoenvironmental history of East Africa, it is likely that the region hosted these conditions during the Late Cenozoic. Recent improvements on environmental hypotheses of hominin evolution highlight the role of periods of short and extreme climate variability during the Late Cenozoic specific to East Africa in driving evolution. Our results elucidate how the forest biomes of East Africa can appear and disappear under fluctuating environmental conditions and demonstrate how this climate variability might be recognized on the biosphere level.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{RomeroMujalliJeltschTiedemann2018,
  author    = {Romero-Mujalli, Daniel and Jeltsch, Florian and Tiedemann, Ralph},
  title     = {Individual-based modeling of eco-evolutionary dynamics},
  series = {Regional environmental change},
  volume    = {19},
  journal   = {Regional environmental change},
  number    = {1},
  publisher = {Springer},
  address   = {Heidelberg},
  issn      = {1436-3798},
  doi       = {10.1007/s10113-018-1406-7},
  pages     = {1 -- 12},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {A challenge for eco-evolutionary research is to better understand the effect of climate and landscape changes on species and their distribution. Populations of species can respond to changes in their environment through local genetic adaptation or plasticity, dispersal, or local extinction. The individual-based modeling (IBM) approach has been repeatedly applied to assess organismic responses to environmental changes. IBMs simulate emerging adaptive behaviors from the basic entities upon which both ecological and evolutionary mechanisms act. The objective of this review is to summarize the state of the art of eco-evolutionary IBMs and to explore to what degree they already address the key responses of organisms to environmental change. In this, we identify promising approaches and potential knowledge gaps in the implementation of eco-evolutionary mechanisms to motivate future research. Using mainly the ISI Web of Science, we reveal that most of the progress in eco-evolutionary IBMs in the last decades was achieved for genetic adaptation to novel local environmental conditions. There is, however, not a single eco-evolutionary IBM addressing the three potential adaptive responses simultaneously. Additionally, IBMs implementing adaptive phenotypic plasticity are rare. Most commonly, plasticity was implemented as random noise or reaction norms. Our review further identifies a current lack of models where plasticity is an evolving trait. Future eco-evolutionary models should consider dispersal and plasticity as evolving traits with their associated costs and benefits. Such an integrated approach could help to identify conditions promoting population persistence depending on the life history strategy of organisms and the environment they experience.},
  language  = {en}
}