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.[2] He also proposed a multivariate framework to describe the effect of selection on multiple correlated characters, thus helping clarify the much-debated notion of genetic constraints in phenotypic evolution.[5] He later applied and extended these results to study a wide variety of topics in evolutionary biology, including: sexual selection, speciation, the evolution of phenotypic plasticity, of self-fertilization, of life history, of a species range in space and time.[6]
Apart from his work in evolutionary genetics, Lande has substantially contributed to the fields of population dynamics and conservation biology.[5] 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.[7] 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.[5] 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.[5]
Bernt-Erik Sæther, Steinar Engen and Russell Lande: Finite metapopulation models with density-dependent migration and stochastic local dynamics. London: Royal Society, 1999.(Reprint from Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. B, 226(1999)
