Fig. 2

Structure and dynamics of metacommunities in patchy landscapes. A Kymographs built from raw fluorescence images from a competition experiment between E. coli (left panel) and P. aeruginosa (right panel). B Zoomed-in view of four patches \(k=1\cdots 4\) at four different time points \(\tau _j\) (8, 15, 20, 22 h) showing succession from E. coli (magenta) colonization to P. aeruginosa (green) invasion and eventual coexistence (white). C Occupancy dynamics of E. coli, \(E_k\) (top panel), and P. aeruginosa, \(P_k\) (bottom panel), for each of the MHPs shown in B. D Occupancy dynamics for \(E_k\) (left panel) and \(P_k\) (right panel) for all MHPs in the array (light curves) and spatially averaged occupancy (\(\bar{E}\) in magenta, \(\bar{P}\) in green) for all patches (thick curves) for E. coli and P. aeruginosa respectively. E Long-term local community structure after 42 hours of competition for 5100 MHPs across 60 landscapes. The vertical axis represents normalized total occupancy of MHPs \(Z_{k_s}=(E_{k_s}+P_{k_s})/2\). Horizontal axis corresponds to relative fractional occupancy \((1 - \Theta _{k_s}) = E_{k_s}/(E_{k_s}+P_{k_s})\). Frequency of occurrence is depicted on logarithmic scale in blue