A challenge for conservation management is to understand how population and habitat dynamics interact to affect species persistence. In real landscapes, timing and duration of disturbances can vary, and species' responses to habitat changes will depend on how timing of dispersal and reproduction events relate to the landscape temporal structure. For instance, increasing disturbance frequency may promote extinction of species that are unable to appropriately time their reproduction in an ever-changing habitat and favor species that are able to track habitat changes. We developed a mathematical model to compare the effects of pulsed dispersal, initiated by shifts in habitat quality, with temporally continuous dispersal. We tested the effects of habitat (and population) turnover rates on metapopulation establishment, persistence, and long-term patch occupancy. Pulsed dispersal reduced patch occupancy and metapopulation longevity when habitat patches are relatively permanent. In such cases, demographic extinction was the primary form of local extinction. Conversely, when habitat patches are short-lived and new ones are frequently formed, pulsed dispersal promoted rapid colonization, increased occupancy, and prolonged metapopulation persistence. Our results show that species responsiveness to habitat disturbance is critical to metapopulation persistence, having profound implications for the species likely to persist in landscapes with altered disturbance regimes.

Metacommunity theory poses that the occurrence and abundance of species is a product of local factors, including disturbance, and regional factors, like dispersal among patches. While metacommunity ideas have been broadly tested there is relatively little work on metacommunities subject to disturbance. We focused on how localized disturbance and dispersal interact to determine species composition in metacommunities. Experiments conducted in simple two-patch habitats containing eight protozoa and rotifer species tested how dispersal altered community composition in both communities that were disturbed and communities that connected to refuge communities not subject to disturbance. While disturbance lowered population densities, in disturbed patches connected to undisturbed patches this was ameliorated by immigration. Furthermore, species with high dispersal abilities or growth rates showed the fastest post-disturbance recovery in presence of immigration. Connectivity helped to counteract the negative effect of disturbances on local populations, allowing mass-effect-driven dispersal of individuals from undisturbed to disturbed patches. In undisturbed patches, however, local population sizes were not significantly reduced by emigration. The absence of a cost of dispersal for undisturbed source populations is consistent with a lack of complex demography in our system, such as age- or sex-specific emigration. Our approach provides an improved way to separate components of population growth from organisms' movement in post-disturbance recovery of (meta)communities. Further studies are required in a variety of ecosystems to investigate the transient dynamics resulting from disturbance and dispersal.