Colonization: Individual Traits of Colonists and Population Processes

Human activity generates new global processes, including range expansions caused by landscape transformations, climate change, and biological invasions. The study of the causes and processes that accompany the colonization of new areas, as well as the ecological and evolutionary consequences, has been developing rapidly in the last 20 years at the junction of such domains of biology as spatial ecology, ecology of movement, ecology of invasions, metapopulation theory, behavioral ecology, evolutionary ecology, population genetics, and personality research. In this review, we summarize theoretical ideas and empirical studies to answer two main questions: what distinguishes colonists from the residents of source populations and what specific demographic and genetic processes drive and accompany the wave of population expansion?