Natural selection causes evolution when a gradient in fitness corresponds to the levels of a trait, and these levels exhibit heritability. Fitness, however, is intensely complex, because it is a dynamic function contingent on the life history of the species. Thus, demographic patterns exert strong influences on evolutionary outcomes, and may act counterintuitively to yield the traits that we now see in the world around us. Eco-evolutionary dynamics is focused on this complexity, and is rewriting our understanding of both evolution and ecology.

Demographic processes yielding natural selection ultimately yield historical and biogeographic patterns in diversity. At the smallest scales, spatiotemporal variation in density influences natural selection in complicated ways that are only now being unraveled. Studies of evolutionary history and global ecological patterns provide hints as to the demographic processes that resulted in them, and also inform the context under which contemporary demographic processes operate. The relationship between local-scale and global-scale processes is a key unknown in the developing field of eco-evolutionary dynamics.

Current research across scales epitomizes the major dilemmas and advances inherent in the field of eco-evolutionary dynamics. This symposium brings together some of the brightest minds in the field to speak about these linkages.