Meta-Ecosystems

Abstract

Early ecosystem theory, which emphasized strong boundaries between ecosystems, did not consider spatial fluxes in their major explanatory framework based on ecological energetic. To address this limitation, ecosystem ecologists introduced the concept of the landscape, which viewed ecosystems as a continuous mosaic across space. Unfortunately, the continuous mosaic view is difficult to conceptualize and analyze mathematically and is usually restricted to a specific spatial scale of analysis. One potential solution to the problem was to simplify concept by viewing ecosystems being constructed out of discrete patches, which was a major conceptual development in population biology and can be recommended in a number of ecological systems. Therefore, space matters primarily in determining the existence of ecosystem boundaries and the possibility of fluxes across those boundaries. Furthermore, the dynamics of ecosystems, if they are dominated by the flux of materials rather than energy, can be simplified with conservation laws. These simplifications allow us to then talk about a meta-ecosystem, which is this set of discrete ecosystems connected through the fluxes of organisms, materials and energies across ecosystem boundaries. We build on a brief review of metapopulation and metacommunity dynamical models to present a minimal meta-ecosystem model. We demonstrate some important insights derived from early meta-ecosystem models proposed by Loreau et al. [109, 110] to motivate the use of the framework. We then present later work that has shown how flows of matter can further our understanding of species interactions, species assembly, and of ecosystem response to environmental fluctuations.