Metapopulations and metacommunities: combining spatial and temporal perspectives in plant ecology

Supporting Information for Alexander, Foster, Ballantyne, Collins, Antonovics, and Holt (Metapopulations and metacommunities: spatial and temporal perspectives in plant ecology)

Condition-dependent movement and dispersal in experimental metacommunities.

Dispersal and the underlying movement behaviour are processes of pivotal importance for understanding and predicting metapopulation and metacommunity dynamics. Generally, dispersal decisions are condition-dependent and rely on information in the broad sense, like the presence of conspecifics. However, studies on metacommunities that include interspecific interactions generally disregard conditi...

Consumptive and nonconsumptive effects of predators on metacommunities of competing prey.

Although predators affect prey both via consumption and by changing prey migration behavior, the interplay between these two effects is rarely incorporated into spatial models of predator-prey dynamics and competition among prey. We develop a model where generalist predators have consumptive effects (i.e., altering the likelihood of local prey extinction) as well as nonconsumptive effects (alte...

A community of metacommunities: exploring patterns in species distributions across large geographical areas.

Ecological communities show extremely complex patterns of variation in space, and quantifying the relative importance of spatial and environmental factors underpinning patterns of species distributions is one of the main goals of community ecology. Although we have accumulated good knowledge about the processes driving species distributions within metacommunities, we have few insights about whe...

Metacommunities . Spatial Dynamics and Ecological Communities

In the early to mid-twentieth-century ecology was often dismissed as “the study of everything connected to everything else.” This book’s title, obviously extending Levins’s metapopulation concept, suggests an expanded interest in ecological linkages. The editors, also major contributors, are to be commended for the assembly, and the conceptual integration they anticipate will launch a new (and ...