In this post Angela Strecker discusses the recent paper ‘A fresh approach reveals how dispersal shapes metacommunity structure in a human-altered landscape‘, by Barbara Downes, Jill Lancaster, Alena Glaister and William Bovill. One of the largest challenges that ecologists face is understanding the importance of dispersal across patches in ecosystems.  In the process of dispersal, organisms move to different habitats, allowing them to potentially escape … Continue reading A new look at an old problem: Measuring the importance of dispersal in human-impacted systems