A theory of ecological invasions and its implications for eco-evolutionary dynamics

Predicting the outcomes of species invasions is a central goal of ecology, a task made especially challenging due to ecological feedbacks. To address this, we develop a general theory of ecological invasions applicable to a wide variety of ecological models: including Lotka-Volterra models, consumer resource models, and models with cross feeding. Importantly, our framework remains valid even when invading evolved (non-random) communities and accounts for invasion-driven species extinctions. We derive analytical expressions relating invasion fitness to invader abundance, shifts in the community, and extinction probabilities. These results can be understood through a new quantity we term “dressed invasion fitness”, which augments the traditional notion of invasion fitness by incorporating ecological feedbacks. We apply our theory to analyze short-term evolutionary dynamics through a series of invasions by mutants whose traits are correlated with an existing parent. We demonstrate that, generically, mutants and parents can coexist, often by driving the extinction of low-abundance species. We validate theoretical predictions against experimental datasets spanning ecosystems from plants to microbial protists. Our work highlights the central role of ecological feedbacks in shaping community responses to invasions and mutations, suggesting that parent-mutant coexistence is widespread in eco-evolutionary dynamics.