The metacommunity concept: a framework for multi‐scale community ecology

TLDR

The metacommunity concept links spatial scales in ecology, offering insights that contrast with local‑community approaches and has distinct intellectual histories that may be synthesized in future work. This review examines current understanding of the metacommunity concept and applies it to demonstrate its usefulness in reshaping ecological thinking through theoretical and empirical examples. The authors define a metacommunity as a set of local communities connected by dispersal of multiple interacting species and identify four paradigms—patch‑dynamic, species‑sorting, mass effects, and neutral—that emphasize different processes. They show that applying the metacommunity framework modifies existing ecological concepts and is illustrated by several theoretical and empirical case studies.

Abstract

Abstract The metacommunity concept is an important way to think about linkages between different spatial scales in ecology. Here we review current understanding about this concept. We first investigate issues related to its definition as a set of local communities that are linked by dispersal of multiple potentially interacting species. We then identify four paradigms for metacommunities: the patch‐dynamic view, the species‐sorting view, the mass effects view and the neutral view, that each emphasizes different processes of potential importance in metacommunities. These have somewhat distinct intellectual histories and we discuss elements related to their potential future synthesis. We then use this framework to discuss why the concept is useful in modifying existing ecological thinking and illustrate this with a number of both theoretical and empirical examples. As ecologists strive to understand increasingly complex mechanisms and strive to work across multiple scales of spatio‐temporal organization, concepts like the metacommunity can provide important insights that frequently contrast with those that would be obtained with more conventional approaches based on local communities alone.