Synchrony and perturbation transmission in trophic metacommunities

In a world where natural habitats are ever more fragmented, the dynamics of meta-communities is essential to properly understand species responses to perturbations. If species’ populations fluctuate asynchronously, the risk of their simultaneous extinction is low, thus reducing the species’ regional extinction risk. We propose a metacommunity model consisting of two food chains connected by dispersal to study the transmission of small perturbations affecting populations in the vicinity of an equilibrium. We show that perturbing a species in one patch can lead to asynchrony between patches if the perturbed species is not the most affected by dispersal. Dispersal affects rare species the most, thus making biomass distribution critical to understand the response of trophic metacommunities to perturbations. We further partition the effect of each perturbation on species synchrony when several independent perturbations are applied. Our approach allows disentangling and predicting the responses of simple trophic metacommunities to perturbations, thus providing a theoretical foundation for future studies considering more complex spatial ecological systems.