How Prospecting for Informed Dispersal Shapes Biodiversity Patterns in a Metacommunity

Prospecting for future breeding sites is a key aspect of making informed dispersal decisions. The aim of our study is to investigate the role of prospecting in mediating species co-occurrence or competitive exclusion in a metacommunity, thereby altering the dispersal-diversity relationship. An individual-based model (IBM) was developed to simulate a small mammal metacommunity, composed of 10 theoretical species, incorporating local resource competition and regional breeding dispersal. The model included three scenarios of prospecting effort (measured as the number of patches prospected) across the metacommunity: uniform prospecting effort, interspecific differences in prospecting effort, and intraspecific differences in prospecting effort. We also tested the role of potential inheritance for the latter trait. The study further considered costs associated with prospecting and dispersal, including mortality risk during prospecting and integration costs in the new patch. Informed settlement significantly influenced the relationship between dispersal rate and metacommunity diversity. Low prospecting effort led to a steady increase in diversity with higher dispersal rates, while higher prospecting effort resulted in a hump-shaped relationship. High prospecting effort led to rapid colonization of and settlement in high-quality patches, increasing competition and reducing establishment success, especially for species with high resource demands. Introducing dispersal costs, particularly integration costs, reduced metacommunity diversity, but increased prospecting effort partially mitigated this loss. Species-specific prospecting effort, correlated with body mass, resulted in a hump-shaped relationship between dispersal rate and diversity, highlighting the role of prospecting for the competition-colonization trade-off. In contrast, when individual variation in prospecting behaviour was considered a heritable trait, the highest species diversity was observed at increasing dispersal rates, with prospecting efforts stabilising at low levels. The study demonstrates that informed dispersal, specifically prospecting effort, plays a crucial role in shaping metacommunity diversity by mediating competitive species interactions in an individual-based metacommunity simulation model.