Realizing the full predictive potential of our approach which links human impacts to community processes will require increased research efforts and dialog between aquatic and terrestrial ecologists, evolutionary biologists, conservationists and policymakers. Future research aimed at better forecasting human impacts across ecosystems should include targeted, quantitative studies of the strength and function of single or multiple processes in both terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, especially for the understudied processes of speciation and drift. Furthermore, our approach could be used to parametrize a mechanistic model of impacts, processes and biodiversity outcomes. Such a model would allow researchers to make more detailed, mechanistic predictions about how diversity may change in a given ecosystem. This work would build upon recent processes-based simulation studies used to infer the mechanisms shaping diversity through deep time, and across communities and spatial scales (Thompson et al.2020; Hagen et al. 2021a, b). Mechanistic models, when combined with data, can provide more detailed estimates of the relative importance of processes shaping diversity across ecosystems and increase our understanding of how bio-physical properties influence the balance and strength of processes (Table 1).