  The "Wide Area VISTA Extra-galactic Survey" (WAVES) is a 4MOST Consortium
Design Reference Survey which will use the VISTA/4MOST facility to
spectroscopically survey ~2million galaxies to $r_{\rm AB} < 22$ mag. WAVES
consists of two interlocking galaxy surveys ("WAVES-Deep" and "WAVES-Wide"),
providing the next two steps beyond the highly successful 1M galaxy Sloan
Digital Sky Survey and the 250k Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey. WAVES will
enable an unprecedented study of the distribution and evolution of mass,
energy, and structures extending from 1-kpc dwarf galaxies in the local void to
the morphologies of 200-Mpc filaments at $z\sim1$. A key aim of both surveys
will be to compare comprehensive empirical observations of the spatial
properties of galaxies, groups, and filaments, against state-of-the-art
numerical simulations to distinguish between various Dark Matter models.
