Abstract

The concept of feedback in evolutionary ecology and ecosystem science has a rich theoretical history that underpins our current understanding of the intricate interplay between organisms and their environments. This paper explores feedback across scales and hierarchies of biological organization, reviewing its historical context in evolutionary ecology and advocating for interdisciplinary approaches to uncover novel mechanisms. We present a conceptual framework that emphasizes the hierarchical structure of organisms embedded in multispecies communities and can help elucidate feedback mechanisms that underlie biodiversity change. Our approach simplifies the organismal complexity of individuals using a set of traits with explicit genetic architecture and environment-dependent phenotypic expression, and lifespan dynamics that are spatially-explicit and embedded in a multispecies context. Incorporating these ideas into a comprehensive simulation platform would enable researchers to unravel the intricacies of ecological and evolutionary dynamics underlying population dynamics, species interactions, and ecosystem resilience in response to environmental change.