Ecological networks in an agricultural world

Community and ecosystem ecology are paying increasing attention to evolutionary dynamics, offering a means of attaining a more comprehensive understanding of ecological networks and more efficient and sustainable agroecosystems. Here, we review how such approaches can be applied, and we provide theoretical models to illustrate how eco-evolutionary dynamics can profoundly change our understanding of agricultural issues. We show that community evolution models can be used in several contexts: (1) to improve the selection of agricultural organisms within the context of their ecological networks; (2) to predict and manage the consequences of agricultural disturbances on the ecology and evolution of ecological networks; and (3) to design agricultural landscapes that benefit from network eco-evolutionary dynamics, but without negative impacts. Manipulation of landscape structure simultaneously affects both community ecological dynamics (e.g., by modifying dispersal and its demographic effects) and co-evolution (e.g., by changing gene flows). Finally, we suggest that future theoretical developments in this field should consider appropriate co-evolutionary models and ecosystem services