Rebuilding Diversity in the Anthropocene

Rapid changes driven by the Anthropocene—including shifts in climate, nutrients, habitats, and species composition—are causing severe biodiversity loss while creating new ecological opportunities. The balance between short-term ecological shifts in realized niches and long-term evolutionary changes in fundamental niches determines diversification. In the Anthropocene, however, this balance is unstable, as environmental turnover often outpaces adaptive evolution. Processes such as interaction-network rewiring, mutualism loss or emergence, and microbiome-mediated plasticity can hinder or promote diversification. Identifying when opportunities persist, drive fundamental niche evolution, and enable biodiversity to withstand or recover from rapid global change requires a predictive framework linking ecological dynamics, evolutionary mechanisms, and host–microbiome interactions.