MetacommunityGenerationTime.zip

Metacommunities, as sets of communities linked by dispersal, are structured by a complex combination of ecological processes, such as environmental responses, biotic interactions and dispersal. However, some time-related processes have been usually disregarded in these systems, even when they are considered a fundamental component of change in the population dynamics, such as generation time (i.e., the average time between the birth of an individual and the birth of its offspring). With this code, we analyzed the role of generation time in metacommunities of competing species, by means of simulations with stage-structured models. Stage-structured models might contribute to a better understanding of the spatio-temporal variation of biodiversity, assessing temporal processes in a metacommunity context.