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Editorial: Policies and Strategies for the Conservation of Metacommunities

To halt the ongoing decline of biodiversity, policies and strategies are needed that reduce, exclude or even reverse harmful influences on ecosystems. Theoretical (modelling) and empirical approaches across various fields of conservation science and policy have been developed as powerful tools to assess the performance of conservation policies. As a result, a large body of literature exists on the impact of policies on single or multiple independent species. However, many approaches ignore complexities of ecological systems, which limits their usefulness for informing policy. A challenge here is how to incorporate the most salient features of the complexity of ecosystems and the multitude of possible ecological responses to the human actions as an integral part of policy analyses. In this Research Topic, we emphasise two interlinked dimensions of this complexity. First, the spatio-temporal heterogeneity of ecosystems means that a single blanket policy will not result in the same outcomes across the landscape or across time; incorporating that heterogeneity into analysis can help prioritise and target actions in ways that leverage the heterogeneity to produce landscape level impacts. Second, species are usually organised in ecological networks or metacommunities with important interspecific interactions (competition, trophic interactions) that may result in complex and sometimes surprising outcomes of policies on community change; incorporating those interactions into policy analyses enables the analyst to capture such indirect effects on the impact on non-target species of specific policies or to assess the trade-offs across species from general policies. Yet, large gaps still exist in our understanding of how conservation policies operate through spatio-temporal heterogeneity and species interactions to generate conservation outcomes in complex systems. Filling this gap requires the integration of knowledge about conservation policy design and ecological multi-species concepts. These two fields have developed substantially in the past decades but have rarely come into contact with each other.