Metacommunities: Spatial Dynamics and Ecological Communities

Until recently community ecology - a science devoted to understanding the patterns and processes of species distribution and abundance - focused mainly on specific and often limited scales of a single community. Since the 1970s, for example, metapopulation dynamics - studies of interacting groups of populations connected through movement - concentrated on the processes of population turnover, extinction, and establishment of new populations. Metacommunities takes the hallmarks of metapopulation theory to the next level by considering a group of communities, each of which may contain numerous populations, connected by species interactions within communities and the movement of individuals between communities.…