In our approach (Figure 1) we focus on how human impacts are mediated by the fundamental community processes of dispersal, speciation, selection and drift. These processes are not always considered in studies of ecosystem responses to impacts, yet it is these processes that generate the observed responses of ecosystems. Traditional approaches to studying human impacts have documented how one or several drivers such as warming or habitat loss have altered the diversity of ecosystems such as changes in richness, turnover and abundance. These include studies comparing terrestrial and marine ecosystems (Blowes et al. 2019) or less often terrestrial and freshwater systems (van Klink et al. 2020). While many of these studies speculate as to the ultimate causes of ecosystem outcomes, few explicitly consider the full set of processes shaping diversity in ecosystems. In our approach we fully incorporate these processes of dispersal, speciation, selection and drift to more mechanistically link ecosystem responses now and in the future with the myriad ways humans alter these systems.