Metacommunity ecology combines local (e.g., environmental filtering and biotic interactions) and regional (e.g., dispersal and heterogeneity) processes to understand patterns of species abundance, occurrence, composition, and diversity across scales of space and time. As such, it has a great potential to generalize and synthesize our understanding of many ecological problems. Here, we give an overview of how a metacommunity perspective can provide useful insights for conservation biology, which aims to understand and mitigate the effects of anthropogenic drivers that decrease population sizes, increase extinction probabilities, and threaten biodiversity. We review four general metacommunity processes—environmental filtering, biotic interactions, dispersal, and ecological drift—and discuss how key anthropogenic drivers (e.g., habitat loss and fragmentation, and nonnative species) can alter these processes. We next describe how the patterns of interest in metacommunities (abundance, occupancy, and diversity) map onto issues at the heart of conservation biology, and describe cases where conservation biology benefits by taking a scale‐explicit metacommunity perspective. We conclude with some ways forward for including metacommunity perspectives into ideas of ecosystem functioning and services, as well as approaches to habitat management, preservation, and restoration.

中文翻译：

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元社区生态学视角下的生物多样性保护

元群落生态学结合了地方（例如，环境过滤和生物相互作用）和区域（例如，分散和异质性）过程，以了解跨空间和时间尺度的物种丰度、发生、组成和多样性的模式。因此，它具有概括和综合我们对许多生态问题的理解的巨大潜力。在这里，我们概述了元社区的观点如何为保护生物学提供有用的见解，旨在了解和减轻人为驱动因素的影响，这些驱动因素会减少种群规模、增加灭绝概率并威胁生物多样性。我们回顾了四个一般的元社区过程——环境过滤、生物相互作用、扩散和生态漂移——并讨论了关键的人为驱动因素（例如，栖息地丧失和破碎化以及非本地物种）可以改变这些过程。我们接下来描述元群落中的兴趣模式（丰富度、占有率和多样性）如何映射到保护生物学的核心问题，并通过采用尺度明确的元群落视角来描述保护生物学受益的案例。最后，我们提出了一些将元社区观点纳入生态系统功能和服务思想的方法，以及栖息地管理、保护和恢复的方法。并从规模明确的元社区角度描述保护生物学受益的案例。最后，我们提出了一些将元社区观点纳入生态系统功能和服务思想的方法，以及栖息地管理、保护和恢复的方法。并从规模明确的元社区角度描述保护生物学受益的案例。最后，我们提出了一些将元社区观点纳入生态系统功能和服务思想的方法，以及栖息地管理、保护和恢复的方法。