The notion of chemical communication between plants and other organisms has gone from being viewed as a fringe idea to an accepted ecological phenomenon only recently. Within the past two years, the number of published examples of this phenomenon has more than doubled. Ecologists have also realized that communication involving volatile chemicals is commonly involved in diverse roles that were previously not suspected, such as the physiological integration among ramets of an individual plant. Volatile communication is associated with a variety of ecological consequences that are not exhibited by vascular or other more 'hidden' signaling modes. Chemical communication involving volatile signals should be faster, more localized, and less private than communication involving vascular plant connections. These properties are likely to have far-reaching consequences that are beginning to be explored, including eavesdropping and other forms of cheating by individuals and species that were not intended to be participants in the communication by the signal emitter. Thus volatile plant communication has unique consequences for competitors, predators, parasites and prey, and indeed for the entire community and ecosystem. Recent empirical work has greatly increased our awareness of these varied interactions while recent theoretical advances have made us consider of potential advantages and limitations of communication as well as the situations where we expect it to be evolutionarily stable. We have organized the speakers to build from specific systems to broader synthesis. The first speakers will provide state of the art descriptions of the wide number of ways that plants communicate with each other or with a variety of animals. These will include signals used by plants to attract bodyguards, signals used by parasitic plants to find hosts, signals used to attract pollinators and other mutualists, and chemical mediation of soil processes. The later speakers will address the evolution, modeling, and consequences of plant signaling, presenting overviews of the advantages and costs of communication between plants, comparison of volatile and vascular signaling, chemically mediated interaction between herbivores and mutualists, the role of chemical signaling in ecological interactions, and the theory of signal evolution in a tritrophic context.