Evolution in a Community Context: On Integrating Ecological Interactions and Macroevolution

Despite a conceptual understanding that evolution and species interactions are inextricably linked, it remains challenging to study ecological and evolutionary dynamics together over long temporal scales. In this review, we argue that, despite inherent challenges associated with reconstructing historical processes, the interplay of ecology and evolution is central to our understanding of macroevolution and community coexistence, and cannot be safely ignored in community and comparative phylogenetic studies. We highlight new research avenues that foster greater consideration of both ecological and evolutionary dynamics as processes that occur along branches of phylogenetic trees. By promoting new ways forward using this perspective, we hope to inspire further integration that creatively co-utilizes phylogenies and ecological data to study eco-evolutionary dynamics over time and space. Ecology and evolution interact over deep time scales, and innovative new research from a variety of fields is expanding our ability to understand these interactions and their effects. New developments in comparative phylogenetic methods incorporate species interactions in models of character change and lineage diversification, enabling direct tests of hypotheses concerning the impacts of ecological interactions on macroevolution. Advances in community phylogenetics improve the study of macroevolutionary constraints on coexistence by using null models that account for the geography of speciation. Although links between ecology and macroevolutionary patterns are difficult to test using a single framework, the synthesis of multiple research approaches makes it increasingly apparent that reciprocal eco-evolutionary dynamics can influence rates of diversification, phenotypic evolution, and community coexistence patterns.