Food webs are complex systems in which organisms interact with each other and with the abiotic aspects of their environment, thus acting as the conduit for transfers of energy and nutrients through ecosystems. Classical approaches to food webs focus strongly on patterns and processes occurring at the community level rather than at the broader ecosystem scale. Recent developments in community ecology suggest that spatial processes may be important in affecting food web dynamics and affect ecosystems as well, thus leading to the idea of meta-ecosystems. Here, we make a synthesis on how the links between food web dynamics and spatial ecosystem dynamics may be studied through (i) identifying differences between metacommunity and landscape ecology approaches when dealing with food webs, (ii) arguing that a tighter synthesis of the two approaches is needed for a good understanding of how diversity, ecosystem process and trait distributions in landscapes are related, and (iii) laying out how this gap can be efficiently bridged under the framework of meta-ecosystems.

Results/Conclusions

We identify two possible sets of processes that drive spatial food webs and the ecosystems they occur in: trait-dependent processes and material-dependent processes. Both of these have been shown to be important in affecting various aspects of food web ecology and we ask how they may compare to each other and how they may interact. We argue that interactions between them, while complex, are likely and depend strongly on the size of the meta-ecosystem and its connectivity. A more integrative framework to the study of spatial food webs, which takes into account both approaches, might be key in better understanding the links between ecosystem and community dynamics at large spatial scales.