THE WORLD IS PATCHY AND HETEROGENEOUS! TRADE-OFF AND SOURCE SINK DYNAMICS IN COMPETITIVE METACOMMUNITIES

Mouquet N., Hoopes M.F., and Amarasekare P. (2005).

Metacommunities: Spatial dynamics and ecological communities. Eds M. Holyoak, M A. Leibold and R. Holt. Chicago University Press.

Key message : Recognition that the world is patchy and heterogeneous has been the basis for many advances in both fundamental and applied ecology over the last thirty years (Levin 1992). This chapter reviews conceptual advances in the understanding of spatial mechanisms of competitive coexistence and places those advances in the context of metacommunity ecology. We discuss work from the past half century through extremely recent results in order to highlight unexpected links and reinterpretations. We show that apparently different mechanisms have common elements and we discuss options for integrating these elements into a broader theoretical framework. This framework could lead to a general theory of biological diversity for a natural world increasingly transformed by human activities.

Representation of the chronology of some important papers that have studied the conditions of coexistence between competing species in patchy habitats. There was rapid separation between studies that considered homogeneous (white region) and heterogeneous (gray region) environments. Three main branches have emerged from the precursor works of Skellam (1951) and Levene (1953), respectively the source-sink hypothesis (dark gray arrows), the competition colonization hypothesis (gray arrows) and a third branch that have studied the consequences of transient local coexistence in patch models (white arrows). We have added a chronological axis at the bottom of the figure. This list is not exhaustive, but rather represents what we think are the key papers.

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OTHER TOPICS: Aesthetics of Biodiversity, Biogeography, Macroecology & Ecophylogenetics, Experimental Evolution, Functional Biogeography, Functional Rarity, Nature for Future, Metacommunities, Metaecosystems, Reviews and Synthesis, Trophic Biogeography & Metaweb