Efforts to reconcile the interaction of ecological and evolutionary processes have largely adopted one of two approaches. What makes this difficult is that ecological and evolutionary processes form a continuum and, while we can observe and test local ecological phenomena, we must usually infer evolutionary processes from current observations, often at larger spatial and temporal scales. The work can inform applications of invasion and restoration ecology by elucidating the importance of changes in abundances, interaction strengths, and rates of evolutionary response in shaping biodiversity.Ī grand challenge in understanding the origins of biodiversity is to ‘disentangle the influence of evolutionary and historical processes operating at larger spatiotemporal scales from ecological processes operating at smaller scales’ (Lessard et al. Insights into biodiversity dynamics at the nexus of ecology and evolution are now achievable by integrating new tools, in particular (i) ecological metrics (interaction networks, maximum entropy inference) across the chronosequence to uncover community dynamics and (ii) genomic tools to understand contemporaneous microevolutionary change. Within this framework, I highlight recent insights from the island chronosequence, in particular the importance of (i) selection and genetic drift in generating diversity (ii) fusion and fission in fostering diversification and (iii) variability upon which selection can act. Here, I focus on the Hawaiian archipelago and summarize the development of ecological and evolutionary research I emphasize spiders because they have attributes allowing analysis of ecological affinities in concert with diversification. Archipelagoes with a known geological chronology provide an opportunity to study ecological interactions over evolutionary time. Integration of these approaches has remained elusive. Research on the dynamics of biodiversity has progressed tremendously over recent years, although in two separate directions – ecological, to determine change over space at a given time, and evolutionary, to understand change over time.
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