Population Dynamics of Crustaceans: Introduction to the Symposium

Crustaceans are a globally-distributed faunal group, found across all habitats from the equator to the poles. They are an ideal focal assemblage for assessment of the impacts of climatic change and anthropogenic disturbance on nonmodel systems, such as how sea currents influence the movements of zooplankton communities in the open ocean, or how ecosystem processes affect phytoplanktonic species with restricted geographic distributions across a cluster of island lakes that could be a new model system for studies of speciation. This symposium introduced early-career researchers working in the fields of phylogeography, ecogenomics, fisheries management, and ecosystem processes with the aim of highlighting the different genetic and ecological approaches to the study of population dynamics of freshwater, estuarine, and marine crustacean species.