From Metapopulation to Metacommunity and the Complications of Community Structure

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 different communities highlights the importance of considering trophic and non-trophic community structure to understand metacommunity dynamics.