Recent trends in community ecology have focused on reconciling ecological and evolutionary perspectives on community assembly and dynamics. New tools, such as community phylogenetics, quantitative methods, and biodiversity informatics, promise to deliver breakthroughs in our understanding of natural systems. Since the time of Darwin, biologists have been fascinated by island biotas, and their study has led to repeated conceptual breakthroughs over the years. In the current era, islands can serve as a natural laboratory for disentangling the ecological and evolutionary processes shaping communities. This symposium will bring together an international group of early career researchers who are all working on the evolutionary ecology of island communities, but from different perspectives. These topics are an intersecting set of interest across the speakers, including i) ecological and evolutionary mechanisms of species-area curves ii) evolution of mutualisms on islands iii) macroecology of island systems, and iv) phylogenetic approaches.