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.
Voolstra et al. (Wed,) studied this question.