Eco-evolutionary dynamics — towards a multi-species perspective - Lynn Govaerts
Channel: Modelling in Ecology and Evolution
Date: 2022-03-31

Keynote by Lynn Govaert (http://www.igb-berlin.de/en/govaert), Group Leader at Leibniz-Institute of freshwater ecology and inland fisheries (IGB), Berlin, on the 29th of March 2022

Abstract:
Unprecedented environmental changes induce strong selection pressures on species. Studies have shown both ecological and rapid evolutionary responses of species to these ongoing environmental changes. Increasing evidence that ecological and evolutionary processes can occur atsimilar temporal and spatial scales and might thus frequently interact has raised the concern that these processes should not be studied in isolation from each other, but instead integrated if we attempt to better understand species responses to environmental change. Even more so, because species are embedded within communities, environmental change does not act on single species, but acts simultaneously on all species within the community, giving rise to potentially complex eco-evolutionary dynamics. We currently still lack a coherent framework to address and study eco-evolutionary dynamics within communities, despite the many theoretical and conceptual advances made during the last decades. Following a synthesis by M. Vellend which showed that community ecology could be organized along analogous processes of evolutionary biology (i.e., selection, migration, drift and diversification), we argue that by explicitly considering interactions between these processes of evolutionary biology and community ecology, it may facilitate our understanding of eco-evolutionary dynamics in multi-species communities. Focusing on interactions between processes of evolutionary biology and community ecology may enable explorations of the full range of eco-evolutionary community dynamics, may provide a way forward to reveal generalities and formulate hypotheses about eco-evolutionary community dynamics and guide the design of novel experiments and theoretical models that explicitly take these interactions into account.

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