OOS 11

Community and Ecosystem Effects of Rapid Evolution

Ecological and evolutionary processes have been often thought to operate under different timescales. While ecological processes could occur within one or a few generations of organisms, evolutionary processes were often believed to require many generations to operate over greater timescales. Nevertheless, many recent studies have shown that evolution may happen rapidly, and thus, provide instantaneous feedback to ongoing ecological processes. For example, in a community with one predator and one prey species, the predator-prey interactions would drive the evolution of prey resistance and predator attacking abilities; in return, this evolution would alter the predator-prey cycles in this community. These findings have prompted the interests of both ecologists and evolutionary biologists in exploring the reciprocal influences of ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Since then, the interaction between ecological and evolutionary processes, mostly at the population level with the main focus on the feedback of intraspecific genetic variation and population dynamics, has received much attention from ecologists from theoretical, observational, and experimental perspectives. However, studies and syntheses focusing on the eco-evolutionary feedback at the community and ecosystem levels are scarce, presumably due to the unclear connection between community and ecosystem properties and intraspecific variation. This session aims to present research on the interactions of ecological and evolutionary processes at the community and ecosystem levels. The session invites speakers using a wide range of approaches in both micro- and macroorganism study systems to investigate the eco-evolutionary dynamics at the community and ecosystem levels. The presentations in this session will cover cutting-edge research on how interspecific interactions, invasions, community assembly, and ecosystem functioning influence and respond to rapid evolution.