Publication Details

Category Text Publication
Reference Category Journals
DOI 10.1111/nyas.14378
Licence creative commons licence
Title (Primary) Biodiversity conservation through the lens of metacommunity ecology
Author Chase, J.M.; Jeliazkov, A.; Ladouceur, E.; Viana, D.S.
Source Titel Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Year 2020
Department iDiv; PHYDIV
Volume 1469
Issue 1
Page From 86
Page To 104
Language englisch
Keywords extinction; rarity; dispersal; ecological drift; biotic interactions; filtering
Abstract Metacommunity ecology combines local (e.g., environmental filtering and biotic interactions) and regional (e.g., dispersal and heterogeneity) processes to understand patterns of species abundance, occurrence, composition, and diversity across scales of space and time. As such, it has a great potential to generalize and synthesize our understanding of many ecological problems. Here, we give an overview of how a metacommunity perspective can provide useful insights for conservation biology, which aims to understand and mitigate the effects of anthropogenic drivers that decrease population sizes, increase extinction probabilities, and threaten biodiversity. We review four general metacommunity processes—environmental filtering, biotic interactions, dispersal, and ecological drift—and discuss how key anthropogenic drivers (e.g., habitat loss and fragmentation, and nonnative species) can alter these processes. We next describe how the patterns of interest in metacommunities (abundance, occupancy, and diversity) map onto issues at the heart of conservation biology, and describe cases where conservation biology benefits by taking a scale‐explicit metacommunity perspective. We conclude with some ways forward for including metacommunity perspectives into ideas of ecosystem functioning and services, as well as approaches to habitat management, preservation, and restoration.
Persistent UFZ Identifier https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=23150
Chase, J.M., Jeliazkov, A., Ladouceur, E., Viana, D.S. (2020):
Biodiversity conservation through the lens of metacommunity ecology
Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1469 (1), 86 - 104 10.1111/nyas.14378