PARENT SESSION
Organized Oral Session 45: Evolution in metacommunities: A new framework for species coexistence
Organizer(s): MC Urban and MA Leibold
Thursday, August 11, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 516 A, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Introduction to evolution in metacommunities.
Leibold, Mathew 1, Urban, Mark2, 1 Section of Integrative Biology, Austin, TX, USA2 School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, New Haven, CT, USA
ABSTRACT- The core of ecological theory on communities has long been focused on the local scale where populations interact by directly affecting each other's demographic rates. This central body of work has been recently expanded greatly by attention to spatial scale, especially at the metacommunity level where regional migration dynamics of at least some of the component species can affect local and regional community dynamics . To date, work on metacommunities has focused strongly on ecological dynamics and has not taken much account of evolutionary processes. Spatial structure above the population level however has long been recognized as an important component of evolutionary dynamics of single species. Recent work on the evolutionary ecology of individual species shows that there can be important connections between the evolutionary dynamics of single species and the multiple interspecific interactions that characterize metacommunities. The question that arises is how do joint evolutionary dynamics and metacommunity dynamics affect each other? In this symposium we seek to clarify our current understanding of these joint dynamics and to identify novel insights about evolutionary ecology in metacommunities that come from this integrated perspective.
Key words: metacommunity, coevolution, evolution