From Metapopulation to Metacommunity and the Complications of Community Structure

Abstract

The metacommunity, as it evolved from Levin's metapopulation, provides a framework to consider the spatial organization of species interactions. Arguably the most fundamental feature of metapopulations and metacommunities are that demes are connected via migration. An important result from Levin's metapopulation work-that increasing migration lowers regional extinction probability-is often incorporated into conceptions of metacommunities. We first use a toy model to show how this result from Levin's metapopulation does not necessarily hold when considering community interactions in a metacommunity context. We also report results from a metacommunity field experiment conducted with a tropical terrestrial leaf litter community and show that migration induces the extinction of predators in the metacommunity. Our result corroborates the findings of a prior metacommunity experiment in a temperate terrestrial leaf litter community. The concordance between these experiments even with vastly di↵erent communities highlights the importance of considering trophic and non-trophic community structure to understand metacommunity dynamics.

Taylor Made Landscapes: Using Taylor's Law to Scale Between Metapopulations and Source-Sinks in Urban Garden Space

“…Regardless of whether the results are general or species-specific, recent work indicates that trophic position may strongly influence how dispersal effects the persistence of metacommunities. In a study of tropical terrestrial leaf litter communities, higher rates of dispersal in non-predators caused higher rates of extinction for predator species (Hajian-Forooshani et al, 2019). Our study could indicate that such a pattern exists since aphid prey were observed to have much greater levels of dispersal than natural enemies.…”