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Historically, many biologists assumed that evolution and ecology acted independently because evolution occurred over distances too great to influence most ecological patterns. Today, evidence indicates that evolution can operate over a range of spatial scales, including fine spatial scales. Thus, evolutionary divergence across space might frequently interact with the mechanisms that also determine spatial ecological patterns. Here, we synthesize insights from 500 eco-evolutionary studies and develop a predictive framework that seeks to understand whether and when evolution amplifies, dampens, or creates ecological patterns. We demonstrate that local adaptation can alter everything from spatial variation in population abundances to ecosystem properties. We uncover 14 mechanisms that can mediate the outcome of evolution on spatial ecological patterns. Sometimes, evolution amplifies environmental variation, especially when selection enhances resource uptake or patch selection. The local evolution of foundation or keystone species can create ecological patterns where none existed originally. However, most often, we find that evolution dampens existing environmental gradients, because local adaptation evens out fitness across environments and thus counteracts the variation in associated ecological patterns. Consequently, evolution generally smooths out the underlying heterogeneity in nature, making the world appear less ragged than it would be in the absence of evolution. We end by highlighting the future research needed to inform a fully integrated and predictive biology that accounts for eco-evolutionary interactions in both space and time.

Environmental contamination is one of the major drivers of ecosystem change in the Anthropocene. Toxic chemicals are not constrained to their source of origin as they cross ecosystem boundaries via biotic (e.g., animal migration) and abiotic (e.g., water flow) vectors. Meta‐ecology has led to important insights on how spatial flows or subsidies of matter across ecosystem boundaries can have broad impacts on local and regional ecosystem dynamics but has not yet addressed the dynamics of pollutants in recipient ecosystems. Incorporating meta‐ecosystem processes (i.e., flux of materials across ecosystem boundaries) into contaminant dynamics can elucidate how contaminants may reverberate among local food chains. Here, we derive a modeling framework to predict how spatial ecosystem fluxes can influence contaminant dynamics and how this influence is dependent on the type of ecosystem flux (e.g., herbivore movement vs. abiotic chemical flows). We mix an analytical and numerical approach to analyze our integrative model which couples two subcomponents that have previously been studied independently of each other—an ecosystem model and a contaminant model. We observe an array of dynamics for how chemical concentrations change with increasing nutrient input and loss rate across trophic levels. When we tailor our range of chemical parameter values (e.g., environmental uptake of contaminant and assimilation efficiency of the contaminant) to specific organic chemicals, our results demonstrate that increasing nutrient input rates can lead to trophic dilution in pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls across trophic levels. However, increasing nutrient loss rate causes an increase in the concentrations of chemicals across all trophic levels. A sensitivity analysis demonstrates that nutrient recycling is an important ecosystem process impacting contaminant concentrations, generating predictions to be addressed by future empirical studies. Importantly, our model demonstrates the utility of our framework for identifying drivers of contaminant dynamics in connected ecosystems including the importance that (1) ecosystem processes and (2) movement, especially movement of lower trophic levels, have on contaminant concentrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]