LAUSR

Idealized metacommunity structures (i.e. checkerboard, random, quasi‐structures, nested, Clementsian, Gleasonian and evenly spaced) have recently gained increasing attention, but their relationships with environmental heterogeneity and how they vary with organism groups remain poorly understood. Here, we tested two main hypotheses: (a) gradient‐driven patterns (Clementsian and Gleasonian) occur frequently in heterogeneous environments and (b) small organisms (here, diatoms) are more likely to exhibit gradient‐driven patterns than large organisms (here, macroinvertebrates).