Evolution has been viewed as occurring primarily through selection among individuals. We present a framework based on multilevel selection for evaluating evolutionary change from individuals to com...

Interactions between plants and microbes have important influences on evolutionary processes, population dynamics, community structure, and ecosystem function. We review the literature to document ...

The origin, distribution, and function of biological diversity are fundamental themes of ecology and evolutionary biology. Research on birds has played a major role in the history and development o...

The spread of synthetic gene drives is often discussed in the context of panmictic populations connected by gene flow and described with simple deterministic models. Under such assumptions, an entire species could be altered by releasing a single individual carrying an invasive gene drive, such as a standard homing drive. While this remains a theoretical possibility, gene drive spread in natural populations

Integrating knowledge and principles of animal behavior into wildlife conservation and management has led to some concrete successes but has failed to improve conservation outcomes in other cases. ...

Flowering plants exhibit two principal life-history strategies: annuality (living and reproducing in one year) and perenniality (living more than one year). The advantages of either strategy depend...

Interactions connect the units of ecological systems, forming networks. Individual-based networks characterize variation in niches among individuals within populations. These individual-based netwo...

While the importance of mutualisms across the tree of life is recognized, it is not understood why some organisms evolve high levels of dependence on mutualistic partnerships, while other species r...

Flower evolution is characterized by widespread repetition, with adaptations to pollinator environment evolving in parallel. Recent studies have expanded our understanding of the developmental basi...

Flowers at times host abundant and specialized communities of bacteria and fungi that influence floral phenotypes and interactions with pollinators. Ecological processes drive variation in microbia...

Recent theory and empirical evidence have provided new insights regarding how evolutionary forces interact to shape adaptation at stable and transient range margins. Predictions regarding trait div...

Plants are the foundation of the food web and therefore interact directly and indirectly with myriad organisms at higher trophic levels. They directly provide nourishment to mutualistic and antagon...

The ecology of fear concerns the population-, community-, and ecosystem-level consequences of the behavioral interactions between predators and prey, i.e., the aggregate impacts of individual respo...

All species within ecosystems contribute to regulating carbon cycling because of their functional integration into food webs. Yet carbon modeling and accounting still assumes that only plants, micr...

Signals of local adaptation have been found in many plants and animals, highlighting the heterogeneity in the distribution of adaptive genetic variation throughout species ranges. In the coming dec...

Linking interspecific interactions (e.g., mutualism, competition, predation, parasitism) to macroevolution (evolutionary change on deep timescales) is a key goal in biology. The role of species int...

Parthenogenesis is asexual reproduction without any required participation from males and, as such, is a null model for sexual reproduction. In a comparative context, we can expand our understandin...

Commensalisms, interactions between two species in which one species benefits and the other experiences no net effect, are frequently mentioned in the ecological literature but are surprisingly lit...

The origin of turtles and their uniquely shelled body plan is one of the longest standing problems in vertebrate biology. The unfulfilled need for a hypothesis that both explains the derived nature...

Plant defense theory explores how plants invest in defenses against natural enemies but has focused primarily on the traits expressed by juvenile and mature plants. Here we describe the diverse way...

Half a million species of herbivorous insects have been described. Most of them are diet specialists, using only a few plant species as hosts. Biologists suspect that their specificity is key to th...

Hedge density, structure, and function vary with primary production and slope gradient and are subject to other diverse factors. Hedgerows are emerging ecosystems with both above- and belowground c...

Food webs are a major focus and organizing theme of ecology, but the data used to assemble them are deficient. Early debates over food-web data focused on taxonomic resolution and completeness, lac...

Neotropical freshwater fishes (NFFs) constitute the most diverse continental vertebrate fauna on Earth, with more than 6,200 named species compressed into an aquatic footprint <0.5% of the total re...

Phylogenomics underpins a stable and mostly well-resolved hypothesis for the interrelationships of extant arthropods. Exceptionally preserved fossils are integrated into this framework by coding th...

I survey the 50-year history of the Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, retitled Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics in 2003. An overview of reviews up through 2009 portrays ...

In recent decades, a burgeoning literature has documented the cultural transmission of behavior through social learning in numerous vertebrate and invertebrate species. One meaning of “cultural evo...

Somatic mutations are common in plants, and they may accumulate and be passed on to gametes. The determinants of somatic mutation accumulation include the intraorganismal selective effect of mutati...

Studies of speciation typically investigate the evolution of reproductive isolation between populations, but several other processes can serve as key steps limiting the formation of species. In par...

Transgenerational plasticity (TGP) occurs when the environment experienced by a parent influences the development of their offspring. In this article, we develop a framework for understanding the m...

Unraveling the origins of Malesia's once vast, hyperdiverse rainforests is a perennial challenge. Major contributions to rainforest assembly came from floristic elements carried on the Indian Plate and montane elementsfrom the Australian Plate (Sahul). The Sahul component is now understood to include substantial two-way exchanges with Sunda inclusive of lowland taxa. Evidence for the relative contributions

Microorganisms drive several processes needed for robust plant growth and health. Harnessing microbial functions is thus key to productive and sustainable food production. Molecular methods have le...

The rate of non-native species introductions continues to increase, with directionality from continents to islands. It is no longer single species but entire networks of coevolved and newly interac...

Understanding how pollen moves between species is critical to understanding speciation, diversification, and evolution of flowering plants. For co-flowering species that share pollinators, competit...

Evolutionary rates and strength of selection differ markedly between haploid and diploid genomes. Any genes expressed in a haploid state will be directly exposed to selection, whereas alleles in a ...

Inhabiting the interface between plant roots and soil, mycorrhizal fungi play a unique but underappreciated role in soil organic matter (SOM) dynamics. Their hyphae provide an efficient mechanism f...

Long-term studies have been crucial to the advancement of population biology, especially our understanding of population dynamics. We argue that this progress arises from three key characteristics ...

Early botanical explorers invoked biogeographic history to explain the remarkable tree diversity of Neotropical forests. In this context, we review the history of Neotropical tree diversity over th...

Climate change is affecting every ecosystem on Earth. Though climate change is global in scope, literature reviews on the biotic impacts of climate change have focused on temperate and polar region...

Guppies in Trinidad range across aquatic environments with fish communities that vary in risk of predation. These communities are often discrete, separated by waterfalls, with high-predation commun...

Species invasions are pervasive in Earth history, yet the ecological and evolutionary consequences vary greatly. Ancient invasion events can be organized in a hierarchy of increasing invasion inten...

Pathogens and insect pests are important drivers of tree mortality and forest dynamics, but global change has rapidly altered or intensified their impacts. Predictive understanding of changing dise...

Evolutionary biology is multivariate, and advances in phylogenetic comparative methods for multivariate phenotypes have surged to accommodate this fact. Evolutionary trends in multivariate phenotyp...

Many questions that we have about the history and dynamics of organisms have a geographical component: How many are there, and where do they live? How do they move and interbreed across the landscape? How were they moving a thousand years ago, and where were the ancestors of a particular individual alive today? Answers to these questions can have profound consequences for our understanding of history

Animals are distinguished by having guts: organs that must extract nutrients from food while barring invasion by pathogens. Most guts are colonized by non-pathogenic microorganisms, but the functions of these microbes, or even the reasons why they occur in the gut, vary widely among animals. Sometimes these microorganisms have co-diversified with hosts; sometimes they live mostly elsewhere in the environment

Nectarivorous birds and bird-pollinated plants are linked by a network of interactions. Here I ask how these interactions influence evolution and community composition. I find near complete evidenc...

To cope with the reduced availability of O2 at high altitude, air-breathing vertebrates have evolved myriad adjustments in the cardiorespiratory system to match tissue O2 delivery with metabolic O2 demand. We explain how changes at interacting steps of the O2 transport pathway contribute to plastic and evolved changes in whole-animal aerobic performance under hypoxia. In vertebrates native to high

The Anthropocene biosphere constitutes an unprecedented phase in the evolution of life on Earth with one species, humans, exerting extensive control. The increasing intensity of anthropogenic force...

As terrestrial leaf litter decomposes in rivers, its constituent elements follow multiple pathways. Carbon leached as dissolved organic matter can be quickly taken up by microbes, then respired bef...

Rapid adaptive radiation poses two distinct questions apart from speciation and adaptation: What happens after one speciation event and how do some lineages continue speciating through a rapid burs...

Behavioral changes, such as those involved in mating, foraging, and migration, can generate reproductive barriers between populations. Birds, in particular, are known for their great diversity in t...

We review the state of the art of alien plant research with emphasis on conceptual advances and knowledge gains on general patterns and drivers, biotic interactions, and evolution. Major advances i...

Mesophotic coral reefs, currently defined as deep reefs between 30 and 150 m, are linked physically and biologically to their shallow water counterparts, have the potential to be refuges for shallo...

Evolutionary conflict occurs when two parties can each affect a joint phenotype, but they gain from pushing it in opposite directions. Conflicts occur across many biological levels and domains but share many features. They are a major source of biological maladaptation. They affect biological diversity, often increasing it, at almost every level. Because opponents create selection that can be strong

Many fields of evolutionary biology now depend on stochastic mathematical models. These models are valuable for their ability to formalize predictions in the face of uncertainty and provide a quant...

Ever since the first plant secondary metabolites (PSMs) were isolated and identified, questions about their ecological functions and diversity have been raised. Recent advances in analytical chemis...

Function-valued traits—phenotypes whose expression depends on a continuous index (such as age, temperature, or space)—occur throughout biology and, like any trait, it is important to understand how...

Phenological mismatch results when interacting species change the timing of regularly repeated phases in their life cycles at different rates. We review whether this continuously ongoing phenomenon...

Bivalve molluscs are abundant in marine and freshwater ecosystems and perform important ecological functions. Bivalves have epifaunal or infaunal lifestyles but are largely filter feeders that coup...

The study of environmental DNA (eDNA) has the potential to revolutionize biodiversity science and conservation action by enabling the census of species on a global scale in near real time. To achie...