Which Ways Forward?
Which Ways Forward?
This chapter discusses the important insights that can be gained from the synthetic analysis of evolution in communities. First, fitness, despite being commonly associated only with evolution by natural selection, also plays a key role in both population and community ecology. Second, the same processes jointly drive the dynamics of species abundances and traits, and these dynamics can only be understood in the context of a community of interacting species. All combinations of abiotic factors and other species' abundances and traits that would permit a species to invade the community without any evolution are contained in the so-called ecological volume of invasibility, in contrast to an evolutionary volume of invasibility that defines the conditions for invasion or adaptation to occur. This chapter also considers speciation, disaggregation and recombination, the traits that influence species interactions, ecological differentiation of species, and the use of phylogeny to elucidate community assembly and structure.
Keywords: evolution, fitness, community ecology, species, trait, invasibility, speciation, species interaction, ecological differentiation, phylogeny
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