PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Michael H. Cortez AU - Swati Patel AU - Sebastian J. Schreiber TI - Destabilizing evolutionary and eco-evolutionary feedbacks drive eco-evo cycles in empirical systems AID - 10.1101/488759 DP - 2018 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 488759 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/06/488759.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/06/488759.full AB - We develop a novel method to identify how ecological, evolutionary, and eco-evolutionary feedbacks influence system stability. Our method determines how system stability is influenced by the stabilities of a focal subsystem (i.e., the dynamics of a subset of variables of a system), its complementary subsystem, and feedbacks between the two subsystems. We apply our theory to nine empirically-parameterized eco-evolutionary models from the literature. We find that ecological feedbacks and evolutionary and eco-evolutionary feedbacks involving exploiter species (predators or pathogens) are typically stabilizing. In contrast, evolutionary and eco-evolutionary feedbacks involving victim species (prey or hosts) are destabilizing more often than not. We also explore how subsystem stability and the speed of evolution interact to determine system stability. These methods coupled with future empirical work at the eco-evolutionary interface will allow us to determine whether the (de)stabilizing effects we observed are common in ecological communities.