First, it is critical to define what we mean by ecological versus evolutionary time.

Ecological time is typically used to identify times of changing environments. This ranges from the effects of invasive species to climate change, and how it effects organisms and their interactions.

A classic example is the desertification of northern Africa (Foley et al, 2003).

Such events can occur over 10s to 1000s of years. From a practical perspective, ecological time is a time scale that we can directly observe.

Evolutionary time includes ecological time; since changing environments (which includes changing organisms and their relationships to one another) directly influences evolution (Carroll et al., 2007).

That said, it is common to present evolutionary time in terms of millions to hundreds of millions of years. Over such long time scales species proliferate and become extinct.

These are time scales difficult if not impossible to imagine.

Evolutionary change that occurs in the ecological time scale is often termed microevolution, although really, at its base, it is not a distinct process. As a recent example, the appearance and spread of antibiotic resistant bacterial pathogens (an evolutionary process) has been driven by an ecological change, the wide-spread medical and vetrinary use of antibiotics, and a molecular mechanism, known as "horizontal gene transfer, that is common among bacteria (see Baquero & Blazquez, 1997).

Perhaps the classic example of ecological evolution is that of industrial melanism, which occurs in environments in which pollution from coal-fired power plants is uncontrolled.

In the north of England such pollution changed the color of trees (and killed the lichens growing on their bark) such that some insects, such as the moth Biston betularia, became more conspicuous to predators. This ecological change led to a change in selection pressure that favored the survival and reproduction of darker variants, and resulted in an increase in "carbonaria" (dark) B. betularia.

In B. betularia, melanism was originally due to a strongly selected, dominant mutation (see Saccheri et al., 2008); as expected, as pollution has come under control, this selection pressure has decreased dramatically, and the frequency of carbonaria variants has decreased.

Using molecular methods, it has been possible to map the location mutation to a 200 kilobase region of the B. betularia genome (see van't Hof et al., 2011).