Dispersal, the movement of individuals between populations, is one of the most fundamental components of ecology and affects processes as diverse as population growth, metapopulation dynamics, and adaptation. A longstanding assumption of many studies on the ecological consequences of dispersal has been that dispersers are a random fraction of the population. Yet empirical data are increasingly revealing that dispersing individuals are not a random subset of the population; instead, dispersers often differ from non-dispersers in phenotype and genotype. Consequently, studies of population- and community-level processes that lump all dispersers into a simple aggregate may incorrectly assess the chance of extinction, rate of population growth, potential for adaptation or genetic differentiation, and impact on other species. Our organized oral session will explore the prevalence and implications of individual-variation in dispersal through presentations that discuss research investigating why individuals vary in their dispersal strategies and how individual variation in dispersal affects populations and communities. The speakers in this session reflect the diversity of scale at which the effects of individual variation on dispersal are being identified. By bringing together researchers working over a diverse range of systems and scales, we believe this session and associated discussion will help to develop a synthetic approach to understanding the role of individual variation in dispersal in ecological and evolutionary processes.