CHAPTER 9
Applied (meta)community ecology:
diversity and ecosystem services at
the intersection of local and
regional processes
Janne Bengtsson
9.1 Introduction
The most pressing ecological questions today con-
cern the management of natural resources. At the
heart of natural resources lies biodiversity. The
common biodiversity in ecosystems provides
goods and services for society, such as food (e.g.
crops, grazing animals, fish), materials for build-
ings and other human artefacts; bioenergy; and
processes such as plant or animal production,
biological control and pollination that result in
those goods (Daily 1997). Ecosystems are also uti-
lized to treat the waste products from human activ-
ities (e.g. Folkeet al. 1997). Behind most of these
ecosystem services areinteractionsbetween species
or functional groups, which are – no matter wheth-
er we are conscious of them or not – modified by
human activities. The ultimate test for the validity
of community ecology, as outlined in the previous
chapters, is whether it can provide useful knowl-
edge for managing ecological interactions and
biological resources in a sustainable way.
Humans are now considered to be the dominat-
ing ecological and evolutionary force on Earth
(Vitouseket al. 1997; Palumbi 2001). Despite this,
in the past, community ecology had an awkward
relationship with human-dominated landscapes.
On one hand, applied questions have been crucial
for theory and empirical studies in both population
and ecosystems ecology. Well-known examples
range from biological control, regulation of wildlife
and fisheries to nutrient cycling and crop produc-
tion. On the other hand, there is a long tradition
among ecologists to separate ecosystems into natu-
ral versus disturbed ones, in which the latter were
disturbed mainly by human activities (Worster
1994). At times, it was even questioned whether
such human-dominated ecosystems had any ‘real
ecology’, and, if so, if it was the same ecology as that
for undisturbed ecosystems. Hence, studies of com-
munities had to be made in pristine systems where
the unnatural humans played a negligible role.
Traces of such notions can still be found within
conservation biology, especially in the USA, when
emphasis is put on ‘wilderness’ and ‘naturalness’.
However, the emergence of recent major issues in
ecology, such as biodiversity conservation, ecosys-
tem services and climate change, show that this is
an unrealistic approach.
In this chapter, I argue that community ecology
ought to understand ecological processes that are
crucial for providing goods and services to society.
Applied questions can both provide large-scale
tests of general ecological theories and lead to cru-
cial insights into basic ecological theory. Using the
theoretical framework of spatial population and
community dynamics, now more trendily referred
to as metacommunity dynamics (Chapter 5), I start
with a short background in classical patch and
niche theory. The juxtaposition of local versus115