Top Highlights

• Metacommunity theory provides a framework to investigate multi-scale processes that drive change in biodiversity across space and time.
• Short-term ecological studies across space have progressed our understanding of biodiversity through a metacommunity lens, however, such snapshots in time have been limited in their ability to explain which processes, at which scales, generate observed spatial patterns.
• Temporal dynamics of metacommunities have been understudied, and large gaps in theory and empirical data have hindered progress in our understanding of underlying metacommunity processes that give rise to biodiversity patterns.
• However, without explicit consideration of multiple spatial scales and the within- and among-species pool connections, conclusions about the processes driving patterns of biodiversity are incomplete.
• Metacommunity theory and its applications are essential to addressing scaling in terms of space (e.g., local vs. regional) and time (i.e., linked to organisms’ generation times), especially in today’s rapidly changing communities and ecosystems (Mouquet and Loreau, 2002; Fahrig, 2003; Fischer and Lindenmayer, 2007).

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