Until recently community ecology--a science devoted to understanding the patterns and processes of species distribution and abundance--focused mainly on specific and often limited scales of a single community. Since the 1970s, for example, metapopulation dynamics--studies of interacting groups of populations connected through movement--concentrated on the processes of population turnover, extinction, and establishment of new populations.
Metacommunities takes the hallmarks of metapopulation theory to the next level by considering a group of communities, each of which may contain...