Competitive and Facilitative Evolutionary Diversification.

A central goal of evolutionary ecology is to understand the role of different ecological processes in producing patterns of macroevolutionary diversification. Theory and empirical evidence have shown that competition between existing species can promote evolutionary diversification through ecological character displacement and, more recently, that competition may play a role both in producing species and in driving their subsequent evolutionary divergence. However, recent theory and experiments suggest that other ecological interactions, such as facilitation, may also be important in the evolutionary diversification of some taxa. Future research in this area will be invaluable in dissecting the relative roles of different ecological processes in producing and maintaining biodiversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]