The metacommunity concept: a framework for multi‐scale community ecology

The metacommunity concept is an important way to think about linkages between different spatial scales in ecology. Here we review current understanding about this concept. We first investigate issues related to its definition as a set of local communities that are linked by dispersal of multiple potentially interacting species. We then identify four paradigms for metacommunities: the patch‐dynamic view, the species‐sorting view, the mass effects...