Environmental stress, adaptation and evolution:An overview

Environmental stress can be characterized as a force shaping adaptation and evolution in changing environments, and it is a property of both the stressor and the stressed. Here we aim to give an overview of the state of the art of evolutionarily orientated stress research and the progress it has made during the last decade. We do this by introducing the contributions to this issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology that resulted from a workshop held in August 2004 in Sandbjerg (Denmark), sponsored by the European Society of Evolutionary Biology (ESEB)