CEMAGREF - UR HYAX, 3275, route de Cézanne - Le Tholonet, CS 40061, 13182 Aix-en-Provence Cedex 5, France.
Ecol Lett. 2011 Mar;14(3):313-23. doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01588.x. Epub 2011 Jan 27.
Classical approaches to food webs focus on patterns and processes occurring at the community level rather than at the broader ecosystem scale, and often ignore spatial aspects of the dynamics. However, recent research suggests that spatial processes influence both food web and ecosystem dynamics, and has led to the idea of 'metaecosystems'. However, these processes have been tackled separately by 'food web metacommunity' ecology, which focuses on the movement of traits, and 'landscape ecosystem' ecology, which focuses on the movement of materials among ecosystems. Here, we argue that this conceptual gap must be bridged to fully understand ecosystem dynamics because many natural cases demonstrate the existence of interactions between the movements of traits and materials. This unification of concepts can be achieved under the metaecosystem framework, and we present two models that highlight how this framework yields novel insights. We then discuss patches, limiting factors and spatial explicitness as key issues to advance metaecosystem theory. We point out future avenues for research on metaecosystem theory and their potential for application to biological conservation.
传统的食物网方法侧重于社区层面而非更广泛的生态系统尺度上发生的模式和过程，并且经常忽略动态的空间方面。然而，最近的研究表明，空间过程会影响食物网和生态系统动态，并导致了“元生态系统”的概念。然而，这些过程已经被“食物网元社区”生态学和“景观生态”学分别解决了，前者侧重于特征的运动，后者则侧重于物质在生态系统之间的运动。在这里，我们认为，必须弥合这一概念差距，才能全面了解生态系统动态，因为许多自然案例表明，特征和物质运动之间存在相互作用。这种概念的统一可以在元生态系统框架下实现，我们提出了两个模型，强调了该框架如何产生新的见解。然后，我们讨论了斑块、限制因素和空间显式性作为推进元生态系统理论的关键问题。我们指出了元生态系统理论的未来研究方向及其在生物保护中的应用潜力。
