Lande is best known for his early work extending
quantitative genetics theory to the context of
evolutionary biology in natural populations. In particular, he developed a
stochastic theory for the evolution of quantitative traits by
genetic drift and
natural selection. Apart from his work in evolutionary genetics, Lande has substantially contributed to the fields of
population dynamics and
conservation biology. In particular, his model on the effect of
habitat fragmentation on the
extinction threshold of territorial species was central to the debate about the conservation of the
Northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest. He and
Georgina Mace contributed to clarify the categories for the
IUCN red list, by proposing new criteria based on measurable quantities relating to times to
extinction. He is a specialist of
stochastic population dynamics, on which he co-authored a book with
Steinar Engen and
Bernt-Erik Sæther, and of methods for estimating
density dependence from
time series of population density. Some of the concepts and tools he introduced, such as the phenotypic
selection gradient (univariate or multivariate, directional or quadratic) and the
G matrix, have become standard in evolutionary biology. ==Publications==