Russell Scott Lande (born 1951) is an American

evolutionary biologist Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life for ...

and

ecologist Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps wi ...

, and an International Chair Professor at Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics at the

Norwegian University of Science and Technology Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to: *Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe *Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway *Demographics of Norway *The Norwegian language, including the ...

(NTNU). He is a

fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, incl ...

and a member of the

United States National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

Education and career

He received his Ph.D. in 1976 from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

where he was a student of

Richard Lewontin Richard Charles Lewontin (March 29, 1929 – July 4, 2021) was an American evolutionary biologist, mathematician, geneticist, and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, h ...

, and completed his Postdoctoral work at the

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, t ...

under

James F. Crow James Franklin Crow (January 18, 1916 – January 4, 2012) was Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a prominent population geneticist whose career spanned from the modern synthesis to the genomic era. Some o ...

. He then held positions at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

University of Oregon The University of Oregon (UO, U of O or Oregon) is a public research university in Eugene, Oregon. Founded in 1876, the institution is well known for its strong ties to the sports apparel and marketing firm Nike, Inc, and its co-founder, billion ...

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

, and

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

. In 2016 he was employed as an International Chair Professor at the

(NTNU).

Work

Lande is best known for his early work extending

quantitative genetics Quantitative genetics deals with phenotypes that vary continuously (such as height or mass)—as opposed to discretely identifiable phenotypes and gene-products (such as eye-colour, or the presence of a particular biochemical). Both branches u ...

theory to the context of

evolutionary biology Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life fo ...

in natural populations. In particular, he developed a

stochastic Stochastic (, ) refers to the property of being well described by a random probability distribution. Although stochasticity and randomness are distinct in that the former refers to a modeling approach and the latter refers to phenomena themselv ...

theory for the evolution of quantitative traits by

genetic drift Genetic drift, also known as allelic drift or the Wright effect, is the change in the frequency of an existing gene variant (allele) in a population due to random chance. Genetic drift may cause gene variants to disappear completely and there ...

and

natural selection Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Charle ...

. He also proposed a multivariate framework to describe the effect of selection on multiple correlated characters, thus helping clarify the much-debated notion of genetic constraints in phenotypic evolution. He later applied and extended these results to study a wide variety of topics in evolutionary biology, including:

sexual selection Sexual selection is a mode of natural selection in which members of one biological sex mate choice, choose mates of the other sex to mating, mate with (intersexual selection), and compete with members of the same sex for access to members of t ...

speciation Speciation is the evolutionary process by which populations evolve to become distinct species. The biologist Orator F. Cook coined the term in 1906 for cladogenesis, the splitting of lineages, as opposed to anagenesis, phyletic evolution within ...

, the evolution of

phenotypic plasticity Phenotypic plasticity refers to some of the changes in an organism's behavior, morphology and physiology in response to a unique environment. Fundamental to the way in which organisms cope with environmental variation, phenotypic plasticity encompa ...

, of

self-fertilization Autogamy, or self-fertilization, refers to the fusion of two gametes that come from one individual. Autogamy is predominantly observed in the form of self-pollination, a reproductive mechanism employed by many flowering plants. However, species o ...

, of life history, of a species range in space and time. Apart from his work in evolutionary genetics, Lande has substantially contributed to the fields of

population dynamics Population dynamics is the type of mathematics used to model and study the size and age composition of populations as dynamical systems. History Population dynamics has traditionally been the dominant branch of mathematical biology, which has ...

and

conservation biology Conservation biology is the study of the conservation of nature and of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of protecting species, their habitats, and ecosystems from excessive rates of extinction and the erosion of biotic interactions. It is an int ...

. In particular, his model on the effect of

habitat fragmentation Habitat fragmentation describes the emergence of discontinuities (fragmentation) in an organism's preferred environment (habitat), causing population fragmentation and ecosystem decay. Causes of habitat fragmentation include geological processes ...

on the

extinction threshold Extinction threshold is a term used in conservation biology to explain the point at which a species, population or metapopulation, experiences an abrupt change in density or number because of an important parameter, such as habitat loss. It is at t ...

of territorial species was central to the debate about the conservation of the

Northern spotted owl The northern spotted owl (''Strix occidentalis caurina'') is one of three spotted owl subspecies. A western North American bird in the family Strigidae, genus ''Strix (genus), Strix'', it is a medium-sized dark brown owl native to the Pacific No ...

in the Pacific Northwest. He and

Georgina Mace Dame Georgina Mary Mace, One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (12 July 1953 – 19 September 2020) was a British ecologist and conservation scientist A conservation scientist is a ...

contributed to clarify the categories for the

IUCN red list The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, also known as the IUCN Red List or Red Data Book, founded in 1964, is the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biol ...

, by proposing new criteria based on measurable quantities relating to times to

extinction Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

. He is a specialist of

population dynamics, on which he co-authored a book with Steinar Engen and Bernt-Erik Sæther, and of methods for estimating density dependence from

time series In mathematics, a time series is a series of data points indexed (or listed or graphed) in time order. Most commonly, a time series is a sequence taken at successive equally spaced points in time. Thus it is a sequence of discrete-time data. Exa ...

of population density. Some of the concepts and tools he introduced, such as the phenotypic selection gradient (univariate or multivariate, directional or quadratic) and the G matrix, have become standard in evolutionary biology.

Publications

Books

Lande et al 2003. Stochastic Population Dynamics in Ecology and Conservation
* Bernt-Erik Sæther, Steinar Engen and Russell Lande: ''Finite metapopulation models with density-dependent migration and stochastic local dynamics''. London: Royal Society, 1999.(Reprint from ''Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. B'', 226(1999)

Representative articles

Lande, R. 1976. Evolution. Natural Selection and Random Genetic Drift in Phenotypic EvolutionLande, R. 1981. PNAS. Models of speciation by sexual selection on polygenic traits Lande, R. and S. J. Arnold. 1983. Evolution. The Measurement of Selection on Correlated Characters Lande, R. 1987. American Naturalist. Extinction Thresholds in Demographic Models of Territorial Populations. Lande, R. 1988. Science. Genetics and demography in biological conservation. Lande, R. 1993. American Naturalist. Risks of Population Extinction from Demographic and Environmental Stochasticity and Random Catastrophes. Lande, R. et al. 2002. American Naturalist. Estimating Density Dependence from Population Time Series Using Demographic Theory and Life‐History Data.

Honours and awards

Sewall Wright Award The Sewall Wright Award is given annually by the American Society of Naturalists to a "senior-level" and active investigator making fundamental contributions the conceptual unification of the biological sciences. The award was established in 1991 a ...

1992 *

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

1996 *

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the MacArthur Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to ...

1997 * Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal 2010 *

Balzan Prize The International Balzan Prize Foundation awards four annual monetary prizes to people or organizations who have made outstanding achievements in the fields of humanities, natural sciences, culture, as well as for endeavours for peace and the br ...

2011 *

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, incl ...

2012 * Elected member,

2015 * Outstanding Paper Award,

The Wildlife Society The Wildlife Society (TWS) is an international non-profit association involved in wildlife stewardship through science and education. The Wildlife Society works to improve wildlife conservation in North America by advancing the science of wildlif ...

(TWS) 2015TWS on the award
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References

Sources

Fisch, Florian «“Who’s Going to Speak up for Nature?”». In: ''Lab Time''s, 1/2012, pp. 20–25 (Interview with Russell Lande)

International Balzan Prize Foundation's biographical and bibliographical data on Lande

External links

Russell Scott Lande
International Balzan Prize Foundation
Lande's profile page, NTNU
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lande, Russell 1951 births Living people Evolutionary biologists American ecologists Population geneticists 21st-century American biologists Fellows of the Royal Society Harvard University alumni Norwegian University of Science and Technology faculty University of California, Irvine alumni University of Chicago alumni MacArthur Fellows