Every year, the award is sponsored by a different organization, reflecting a diversity of values and attributes. This year the Theoretical Ecology Section devoted the award to novel and unconventional ways of theoretical thinking—what we called break-the-mold papers. Departing from mainstream research, break-the-mold papers have the potential to be paradigm shifts in the near future, opening new avenues of work and understanding in theoretical ecology and beyond. Thus, a link between the Section and Santa Fe Institute Press was a no-brainer.

The 2023 ESA Outstanding paper in theoretical ecology goes to Jasper C. Croll and collaborator André M. de Roos for their paper “The regulating effect of growth plasticity on the dynamics of structured populations” published in Theoretical Ecology. In this paper, the authors shed new light on how the interplay between the environment and individual traits, such as growth and reproduction, can impact the persistence of consumer populations. Specifically, this paper reminds us about the role of differences in plasticity (the difference in individual phenotypes due to the influence of the environment) in shaping age-structured and size-structure driven dynamics. This paper provides an elegant theoretical perspective to integrate life-history traits, energy budgets, population dynamics, and feasibility analysis.

Honorable mention to Theo Gibbs, Simon A. Levin and Jonathan M. Levine for their paper “Coexistence in diverse communities with higher-order interactions” published in PNAS. Here the authors incorporate higher-order interactions into a mathematical model of the dynamics of diverse communities and show that many of the rules governing the effects of pairwise interactions on coexistence extend to the higher-order case. The authors’ approach moves from the conventional use of parameterization and establishes an elegant framework based on first principles to illustrate the potential role of higher-order interactions.