ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Evolutionary origins for ecological patterns in space.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Are novel or locally adapted pathogens more devastating and why? Resolving opposing hypotheses.Ecology letters · 2024Pooled it
- Evolution shapes ecosystem resilience through spatial self-organization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Local adaptation to climate has facilitated the global invasion of cheatgrass.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Biogeographic variation in mussel shell thickness and drilling predation on rocky shores.Oecologia · 2025Article
- Local adaptation to climate facilitates a global invasion.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Asymmetrical evolution of cross inhibition in zooplankton: insights from contrasting phosphorus limitation and salinization exposure sequences.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Continuity in morphological disparity in tropical reef fishes across evolutionary scales.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Responses ofEcology and evolution · 2025Article
- Optimal network sizes for most robust Turing patterns.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Coevolutionary hotspots favour dispersal and fuel biodiversity in mutualistic landscapes under environmental changes.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Dispersal evolution alters evolution-mediated priority effects in a metacommunity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- A link between evolution and society fostering the UN sustainable development goals.Evolutionary applications · 2024Article
- Ecosystem effects of intraspecific variation in a colour polymorphic amphibian.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Regional and fine-scale local adaptation in salinity tolerance inProceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Investigating eco-evolutionary processes of microbial community assembly in the wild using a model leaf litter system.The ISME journal · 2024Article
- Late Pleistocene Altitudinal Segregation and Demography Define Future Climate Change Distribution of theAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Mutualistic coevolution and community diversity favour persistence in metacommunities under environmental changes.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Mito-nuclear selection induces a trade-off between species ecological dominance and evolutionary lifespan.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- The terroir of the finch: How spatial and temporal variation shapes phenotypic traits in DARWIN'S finches.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- The overlooked complexity of avian brood parasite-host relationships.Ecology letters · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Historically, many biologists assumed that evolution and ecology acted independently because evolution occurred over distances too great to influence most ecological patterns. Today, evidence indicates that evolution can operate over a range of spatial scales, including fine spatial scales. Thus, evolutionary divergence across space might frequently interact with the mechanisms that also determine spatial ecological patterns. Here, we synthesize insights from 500 eco-evolutionary studies and develop a predictive framework that seeks to understand whether and when evolution amplifies, dampens, or creates ecological patterns. We demonstrate that local adaptation can alter everything from spatial variation in population abundances to ecosystem properties. We uncover 14 mechanisms that can mediate the outcome of evolution on spatial ecological patterns. Sometimes, evolution amplifies environmental variation, especially when selection enhances resource uptake or patch selection. The local evolution of foundation or keystone species can create ecological patterns where none existed originally. However, most often, we find that evolution dampens existing environmental gradients, because local adaptation evens out fitness across environments and thus counteracts the variation in associated ecological patterns. Consequently, evolution generally smooths out the underlying heterogeneity in nature, making the world appear less ragged than it would be in the absence of evolution. We end by highlighting the future research needed to inform a fully integrated and predictive biology that accounts for eco-evolutionary interactions in both space and time.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.