A process based metacommunity framework – new paper in Ecology Letters

Bram was part of a working group hosted by the German Integrative Biology Institute in Leipzig that had the ambition to better understand how communities interact in space by including a much needed temporal dimension. In a first paper lead by Patrick Thompson, we present a novel framework to understand (and study) how ecological communities can interact in space and how this leads to different temporal dynamics in community data. Instead of trying to infer process from community patterns, this framework explicitly varies three underlying processes (density dependent competition, density independent environmental filtering and dispersal) and shows that by doing this a whole range of possible metacommunity dynamics can be obtained including all currently known and described dynamics as well as a range of dynamics that have remained unconsidered and unstudied.

We believe it can be an important first step to achieve a much needed synthesis in the field of metacommunity ecology.

The study was published as an “Idea and perspectives” piece in the journal Ecology Letters

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ele.13568