Species Insurance Trumps Spatial Insurance in Stabilizing Biomass of a Marine Macroalgal Metacommunity

Theory predicts that species and spatial insurance should reduce variability in regional (i.e., metacommunity) biomass, as biomass is aggregated across ecological hierarchical levels from local populations up to the metacommunity. We found that species insurance rather than spatial insurance reduced the annual variation in regional biomass of understory macroalgal assemblages in giant kelp forests. A few core species drove this pattern, exhibiting asynchronous dynamics in response to temporal variation in temperature and nutrients over the 14‐yr study, while synchronous spatial dynamics of both local populations and communities were driven by oceanographic processes operating over larger spatial scales. This photograph illustrates the article “Species insurance trumps spatial insurance in stabilizing biomass of a marine macroalgal metacommunity” by Thomas Lamy, Shaopeng Wang, Delphine Renard, Kevin D. Lafferty, Daniel C Reed, and Robert J. Miller published in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.271