Animal-vectored nutrient flows across resource gradients influence the nature of local and meta-ecosystem functioning

Organisms move across landscapes mediating nutrient, energy, and biomass exchanges. Meta-ecosystem ecology offers a framework to study how these flows affect ecosystem functions in space and time. However, meta-ecosystem models often represent consumer movement as diffusion along gradients of resources. Crucially, this assumes that consumer movement connects the same trophic compartments among patches of the same ecosystem. Yet, empirical evidence shows that organisms move across different ecosystems and connect diverse trophic compartments in diffusive and non-diffusive ways. Here, we derive a two-patch meta-ecosystem model that accounts for both types of organismal movement, and we investigate their influences on local and meta-ecosystem functions. We apply a novel approach, modelling consumer movement through a dispersers’ pool that captures the fraction of moving organisms and allows us to partition local and regional dynamics. We show that non-diffusive consumer movement increases landscape heterogeneity while diffusive consumer movement enhances source–sink dynamics. Local ecosystem differences driven by consumer movement type are less prevalent at meta-ecosystem extents. Thus, movement type is essential for predicting local ecosystem dynamics. Our results support recent calls to consider explicitly the role of consumers in shaping and maintaining ecosystem functions across spatial extents.