Figure 2.

Metacommunities are often drawn as networks of completely connected sites (A) however, it is more likely that strong dispersal paths only exist in a subset of potential paths because of barriers or dispersal limitation (B). In this case (B), each habitat patch has a local metacommunity of habitat patches directly exchanging individuals with a focal patch (C,D,E), and the larger region can be conceptualized as multiple local metacommunity networks which share nodes in common and overlap (F).