Dear Colleagues,

A metacommunity is a set of local communities that are linked by the dispersal of multiple potentially interacting species. Metacommunity theory describes the processes that occur at the metacommunity scale and suggests novel ways of thinking about species interactions, with fundamental implications for conservation ecology and biogeography.

The editor of this Special Issue welcomes submissions of both original research and synthetic reviews, including, but not limited to: 1) analyses of metacommunity structure; 2) analyses of metacommunity biodiversity (alpha, beta and gamma diversity); 3) analyses of species assemblage (modularity, nestedness, and species co-occurrences); 4) analyses of metacommunity changes over time; 5) analyses of the connection between species assemblage and environmental/anthropogenic drivers; 6) conceptual models to explain patterns in presence–absence data; 7) analyses of dispersal dynamics among communities; and 8) analysis of the biotic drivers (e.g., competition and mutualism) that shape the presence–absence of species. Studies about any type of metacommunity (e.g., islands in an archipelago, wetlands on land, and networks of protected areas) of both animals and plants are welcome, with a main focus on biodiversity conservation.

Dr. Alessandro Ferrarini
Guest Editor

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• biotic drivers
• dispersal dynamics
• environmental/anthropogenic drivers
• metacommunity biodiversity
• metacommunity changes over time
• metacommunity structure
• species assemblage
• species functional traits

1. Title: The Integrated Diversity Framework for conserving metacommunities
Authors: Matthew P. Hammond
Affiliation: Department of Biology, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4K1 Canada
Abstract: Conserving metacommunities is challenging because practitioners must manage both local communities and species metapopulations that share the same landscape. Diversity partitions (e.g., Whittaker's γ = αβ) used in conservation, however, focus only on species diversity at local and regional scales. They make no reference to the diversity within a species – such as the number of populations in a metapopulation – that is so crucial to the persistence of wildlife at regional scales. To fill this gap and better capture the breadth of diversity elements to be conserved in a metacommunity, we expanded Whittaker’s classic partition to create the Integrated Diversity Framework. It parses the total diversity of populations in a landscape into three conservation targets to be optimized by managers: Mean local species richness (α.s), the mean number of populations per species metapopulation (α.p) and the number of distinct communities (β), which often coincides with habitat diversity. We illustrate this integrated set of diversity measures for two applications in simulated and real landscapes. First, we show how the framework allows tracking of diversity changes that are obscured by other, less-nuanced partitions. Second, we add new interpretation to diversity-area curves, with implications for setting of reserve sizes that balance diversity targets of both communities and metapopulations. Integrated Diversity may offer a new and unified perspective on how different kinds of biodiversity coincide and trade-off in metacommunities, and thus how they may be optimally preserved.