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 numerous populations, connected by species interactions within communities and the movement of individuals between communities. In examining communities open to dispersal, the book unites a broad range of ecological theories, presenting some of the first empirical investigations and revealing the value of the metacommunity approach.

The collection of empirical, theoretical, and synthetic chapters in Metacommunities seeks to understand how communities work in fragmented landscapes. Encouraging community ecologists to rethink some of the leading theories of population and community dynamics, Metacommunities urges ecologists to expand the spatiotemporal scales of their research. 

A pioneering work, Species Diversity in Ecological Communities looks at biodiversity in its broadest geographical and historical contexts. For many decades, ecologists have studied only small areas over short time spans in the belief that diversity is regulated by local ecological interactions. However, to understand fully how communities come to have the diversity they do, and to properly address urgent conservation problems, scientists must consider global patterns of species richness and the historical events that shape both regional and local communities.

The authors use new theoretical developments, analyses, and case studies to explore the large-scale mechanisms that generate and maintain diversity. Case studies of various regions and organisms consider how local and regional processes interact to determine patterns of species richness. The contributors emphasize the fact that ecological processes acting quickly on a local scale do not erase the effects of regional and historical events that occur more slowly and less frequently.

This book compels scientists to rethink the foundations of community ecology and sets the stage for further research using comparative, experimental, geographical, and historical data.