Climate forecasts project change not only in the mean of climate variables but also in their variance. If these dual changes interact, then future ecological dynamics will be difficult to predict using current experimental approaches, which typically change the mean or impose a single extreme event, such as drought. We designed a new field experiment to factorially reduce mean precipitation and increase its interannual variabi...

Species' persistence in increasingly variable climates will depend on resilience against the fitness costs of environmental stochasticity. Most organisms host microbiota that shield against stressors. Here, we test the hypothesis that, by limiting exposure to temporally variable stressors, microbial symbionts reduce hosts' demographic variance. We parameterized stochastic population models using data from a 14‐year symbiont‐re...

Plant traits can be helpful for understanding grassland ecosystem responses to climate extremes, such as severe drought. However, intercontinental comparisons of how drought affects plant functional traits and ecosystem functioning are rare. The Extreme Drought in Grasslands experiment (EDGE) was established across the major grassland types in East Asia and North America (six sites on each continent) to measure variability in...

The origins of geographic races in wide‐ranging species are poorly understood. In Texas, the texanus subspecies of Helianthus annuus has long been thought to have acquired its defining phenotypic traits via introgression from a local congener, H. debilis , but previous tests of this hypothesis were inconclusive. Here, we explore the origins of H. a. texanus using whole genome sequencing data from across the entire range of H....

The wild North American sunflowers Helianthus annuus and H. debilis are participants in one of the earliest identified examples of adaptive trait introgression, and the exchange is hypothesized to have triggered a range expansion in H. annuus . However, the genetic basis of the adaptive exchange has not been examined. Here, we combine quantitative trait locus ( QTL ) mapping with field measurements of fitness to identify candi...

Publication of The Genetics of Colonizing Species in 1965 launched the field of invasion genetics and highlighted the value of biological invasions as natural ecological and evolutionary experiments. Here, we review the past 50 years of invasion genetics to assess what we have learned and what we still don't know, focusing on the genetic changes associated with invasive lineages and the evolutionary processes driving these cha...

The hypothesis that interspecific hybridisation promotes invasiveness has received much recent attention, but tests of the hypothesis can suffer from important limitations. Here, we provide the first systematic review of studies experimentally testing the hybridisation‐invasion (H‐I) hypothesis in plants, animals and fungi. We identified 72 hybrid systems for which hybridisation has been putatively associated with invasiveness...

High‐elevation ecosystems are expected to be particularly sensitive to climate warming because cold temperatures constrain biological processes. Deeper understanding of the consequences of climate change will come from studies that consider not only the direct effects of temperature on individual species, but also the indirect effects of altered species interactions. Here we show that 20 years of experimental warming has chang...

Meta‐analysis is increasingly used in ecology and evolutionary biology. Yet, in these fields this technique has an important limitation: phylogenetic non‐independence exists among taxa, violating the statistical assumptions underlying traditional meta‐analytic models. Recently, meta‐analytical techniques incorporating phylogenetic information have been developed to address this issue. However, no syntheses have evaluated how o...