Global changes are impacting biodiversity and, at the same time, allow to identify major gaps in our understanding of key ecological and evolutionary processes. An emerging paradoxical gap is the so called “tyranny of the golden mean”: individual differences, albeit at the root of the evolutionary theory and ubiquitous in natural populations, are commonly encapsulated within descriptive statistics. This approach blurs the role played by non-average individuals within the study processes, potentially biasing our appreciation of the underlying mechanisms.
HYBRIND addresses address this gap by focusing on the role of individual differences in hybridization dynamics. Hybridization is at the same time a fundamental step of major evolutionary processes, a consequence of global changes (e.g. climate changes, biological invasions), and a main trigger of their outcomes. Through a combination of experimental and modelling approaches, HYBRIND investigates how inter-individual diversity impacts hybridization and its outcomes, and our ability to predict and forecast their relevance under several scenarios of global change.