Friday, August 11, 8-11:30 am
Organizers: Marc Johnson, Randall Hughes

Understanding the ecological and ecosystem-level consequences of biodiversity is a fundamental challenge in ecology. Decades of research and intense debate have given way to a growing consensus concerning the consequences of species diversity, as well as the mechanisms underlying the effects of diversity. Despite this advance in our knowledge, ecologists know very little about the ecological consequences of one of the most important sources of biodiversity—genetic diversity. By combining ecological and evolutionary approaches, the burgeoning field of community genetics has revealed that genotypic differences between individuals within populations can have large effects on communities and ecosystem processes. This suggests that genetic diversity can have consequences for communities of organisms similar to species diversity. Given the ubiquity of genetic variation in nature and its importance to basic and applied problems in biology, understanding the community and ecosystem consequences of genetic diversity is quickly becoming an important goal of ecological research. In this symposium, we will discuss and synthesize the recent conceptual and empirical advances in our understanding of the ecological consequences of genetic diversity. The symposium will focus on the effects of genetic diversity on individual species' demography, species interactions within and between trophic levels, and ecosystem dynamics, with the ultimate goal of determining when genetic diversity is likely to be most important. We will also examine how genetic diversity influences the interplay between ecological and evolutionary processes. Talks will feature experimental field and laboratory studies, observational research, and mathematical theory to explore how genetic diversity influences the ecology of organisms from microbes to dominant forest trees in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.