When Policy Shapes Selection: Anticipating Evolutionary Feedbacks in Conservation

Kailas Honasoge, Luca Lubrano Lavadera, Matthew P Adams, Joel S Brown, Kateřina Staňková, Maria Kleshnina 

Applied ecology and conservation increasingly operate in systems where ecological and evolutionary processes are tightly coupled and can unfold on management-relevant timescales, yet most policy still treats populations as evolutionarily static. As a result, interventions often generate unintended outcomes, from resistance evolution and harvest-induced trait shifts to hidden losses of adaptive capacity under apparently stable management. We argue that conservation should be reframed as an evolutionary decision problem and propose Stackelberg evolutionary games (SEGs) as a framework for doing so. In SEGs, managers act as leaders who shape selective environments through policy, while populations and stakeholders respond as adaptive followers through ecological, behavioral, and evolutionary change. This framing makes explicit that conservation is not simply ecological control, but a strategic interaction with evolving systems. Through simple examples, we demonstrate how evolutionary rescue, evolutionary suicide, or hidden eco-evolutionary tipping points may arise depending on how interventions reshape fitness landscapes and how conservation objectives are formulated. Policies that stabilize population size in the short term may erode evolutionary stability and adaptability, whereas objectives that explicitly account for traits and their diversity can steer systems toward more robust long-term outcomes. SEGs provide a tractable framework for anticipating evolutionary feedbacks and designing conservation policy that works with, rather than against, evolution.