Towards a more precise – and accurate – view of eco‐evolution

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, the number of papers focused on ‘eco‐evo dynamics’ has increased exponentially (Figure 1). This pattern suggests the rapid growth of a new, integrative discipline. We argue this overstates the case. First, the terms ‘eco‐evo dynamics’ and ‘eco‐evo interactions’ are used too imprecisely. As a result, many studies that claim to describe eco‐evo dynamics are actually describing basic ecological or evolutionary processes. Second, these terms are often used as if the study of how ecological and evolutionary processes are intertwined is novel when, in fact, it is not. The result is confusion over what the term ‘eco‐evolution’ and its derivatives describe. We advocate a more precise definition of eco‐evolution that is more useful in efforts to understand and characterise the diversity of ecological and evolutionary processes and that focuses attention on the subset of those processes that occur only when ecological and evolutionary timescales are comparable. 1Figure Number of papers returned, by year, by a search in Web of Science with the term ‘eco‐evolutionary dynamics' as accessed on 7 January 2021.

Experimentally decomposing phytoplankton community change into ecological and evolutionary contributions

“…Within the exponentially increasing numbers of studies published in the field of Eco-Evolution (Bassar et al, 2021), the number of studies quantifying the relative contributions of both aspects of diversity change for community properties or mean trait changes are still scarce. Existing partitioning metrics, which allow quantifying the ecological and evolutionary contributions, could be a valuable tool to assess the relative importance of intraspecific diversity effects for community-level responses.…”

Multi-morph eco-evolutionary dynamics in structured populations

“…Our formalism has strong links with the current interest in clarifying the connection between adaptive dynamics and quantitative genetics models (Abrams, 2001; Day, 2005; Lion, 2018c) and analysing eco-evolutionary dynamics at different time scales (see e.g. Bassar et al (2021)). This has led to various theoretical developments that employ very similar ideas to those we use here, and focus on fundamental ecological questions such as transient dynamics (Day & Proulx, 2004), community stability (Barabás & D’Andrea, 2016), multivariate traits (Mullon & Lehmann, 2019), demographic stochasticity (Débarre & Otto, 2016) or periodic environments (Lion & Gandon, 2021).…”

How does genetic architecture affect eco-evolutionary dynamics? A theoretical perspective

“…In theoretical studies, common approaches assume continuous quantitative traits controlled by many loci with small effects:true0dzfalse¯dt= ffalse(z¯, Nfalse)and1emtrue0dNdt= gfalse(z¯, Nfalse),}where zfalse¯ is a mean value of a quantitative trait, N is a population density, and f and g represent their dynamics [12,18,20]. Mean trait dynamics is often represented bytrue0dzfalse¯dt=ν∂W¯∂z¯,where ν is additive genetic variance and Wfalse¯ is population mean fitness (i.e.…”

“…The resultant feedback between ecological processes and rapid adaptive evolution is called eco-evolutionary dynamics [12]. Eco-evolutionary dynamics is one of the most active research areas in ecology and evolutionary biology [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] not only for the synthesis of these two basic sciences, but also for conservation and management of wild organisms rapidly evolving in response to drastic environmental changes [21][22][23].…”