Meta-CHANS: Linking Metacommunity Ecology with Coupled Human and Nature Systems to Foster Conservation Management

Spatial processes shape both ecological dynamics and human decision-making. Here, we propose a unifying framework – Meta-CHANS – that integrates metacommunity ecology into the concept of Coupled Human And Natural Systems (CHANS). We highlight how recent theoretical and methodological advances, especially in species distribution modeling and process inference, allow the identification of dominant metacommunity dynamics and their consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem function. We discuss how coupling between human and natural systems across spatial scales might influence ecosystem processes and properties, and how this can inform a decision-making process using elements of structured decision-making. We demonstrate the applicability of our Meta-CHANS framework with three selected examples from river management, urban green space planning, and invasive species management. We illustrate how local- and landscape-level intervention alternatives might lead to different outcomes in terms of metacommunity processes, emerging metacommunity archetypes, and ecosystem properties, and highlight the potential of Meta-CHANS to bridge ecological theory and applied environmental decision-making.