Meeting Abstract
Human activity has vastly accelerated the rate of novel community assembly through invasive species, habitat alteration, and climate change. As these processes often involve rapid adaptation to new conditions, incorporating evolution into a theoretical understanding of community formation is vital. The strength of species-level interactions that help determine assembly outcomes can be mediated by individual trait variation. We used eco-evolutionary models to examine the effect of intraspecific phenotypic variation on invasion success in a variety of community modules. Our preliminary results suggest that populations when invading a community to which they are maladapted or one which is dominated by predation selection pressures; conversely, lower variance populations are more successful when the greatest selection pressure is resource acquisition.
