Hybrid Day Meeting | Organismal resilience in a rapidly changing world

This is a hybrid day meeting, offering the option of in-person tickets or online.

Thie meeting supports a Special Issue of the the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society

Over the course of their evolutionary histories, organisms have adapted to cope with an unending array of challenges, and they continue to cope with novel pressures to this day. But this resiliency is not without limits, and in our current era of rapid environmental change, the resilience of many organisms is being profoundly tested. Unprecedented rates of habitat alteration, as well as exposure to novel pollutants, and other stressors all currently combine to push the resiliency of individual organisms, their populations, and their communities to their limits. Surpassing these limits may have dramatic economic consequences if they disrupt key ecosystem services.

The mechanisms that allow organisms to both buffer system function from perturbation, and dynamically respond to change are the foundation of organismal resilience. Understanding these mechanisms is one the most pressing challenges in modern biology. Meeting this challenge will require perspectives that span all levels of biological organization, from genes to populations to ecosystems, and collaboration and integration across many different biological disciplines. Organisms are the nexus that unites lower-level genetic, cellular, and physiological processes that underlie resilience to concepts of resilience at the population, community, and ecosystem levels. Why are some individuals and taxa more resilient than others? And how does individual and species-level variation in resilience relate to the resilience of populations, communities, and entire ecosystems? This symposium will address these and related questions to advance our understanding of organismal resilience, and its potential to buffer organisms from environmental change.

Speakers

• Patricia Schulte (University of British Columbia)
• Chris Wheat (Stockholm University)
• Rose Thorogood (University of Helsinki)
• Luis Chevin (Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive, CNRS Montpellier)
• Shane Campbell-Staton (Princeton University)
• Glenn Yannic (Université Savoie Mont Blanc & Laboratorie d’écologie Alpine)
• Chloe Haberkorn (Stockholm University)
• Maren Vitousek (Cornell University)

Posters

A limited number of posters will be exhibited. Short talks (~15 minutes) will also be selected from the successful posters, with an emphasis on early-career researchers. If you would like to contribute a poster, please submit a title and abstract (max 200 words), with lead author affiliation and career stage, to biojlinnsoc@linnean.org by 17.00 (BST) Friday 5 September 2025.

Special Issue

Papers from the symposium will contribute to a special issue of the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, which publishes open-access original papers on all aspects of the evolutionary biology of diverse organisms and ecological systems. The call for papers for the special issue closes on 15 January 2026.

Tickets

Online tickets are offered at a flat rate, and include access to the livestream, as well as access to recorded videos to enable people across different timezones to hear the talks.

In person tickets include refreshments, lunch and an evening drink reception. We offer discounts to Linnean Society members, students and concessions.

Please buy the concession ticket if you are any of the below:

• 65 years of age, or over
• Under 26 years of age
• Currently in receipt of UK government benefit (including, but not limited to, Income Based Jobseeker's Allowance, Income-related Employment and Support Allowance, Income Support, Working Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit and Housing Benefit, and Universal Credit).
• Currently in full-time education.

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This event is supported by Oxford University Press and the Company of Biologists.

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