Metacommunity Theory
Metacommunities are groups of spatially separate communities that are connected by the dispersal of multiple potentially interacting species. The concept at its simplest level embraces the fact that communities are never closed despite being spatially separate; there is always some form of immigration and emigration happening. This “open” view of the world shares much with meta-population and meta-ecosystem/subsidy ecology, and overlaps with macroecology. We bring the metacommunity perspective to all of our projects and are committed to advancing our understanding of metacommunity ecology through modeling projects and the analysis of large datasets.
Check out some of recent papers in the American Naturalist and Oikos Forum to see the type of projects we’ve been working on. Topics of particular interest include understanding the factors that create β-diversity; the role of species pool size and functional diversity in metacommunity dynamics; and temporal stability in metacommunity structure.
Check out some of recent papers in the American Naturalist and Oikos Forum to see the type of projects we’ve been working on. Topics of particular interest include understanding the factors that create β-diversity; the role of species pool size and functional diversity in metacommunity dynamics; and temporal stability in metacommunity structure.