  One of the central questions of metacommunity theory is how dispersal of
organisms affects species diversity. Here we show that the diversity-dispersal
relationship should not be studied in isolation of other abiotic and biotic
flows in the metacommunity. We study a mechanistic metacommunity model in which
consumer species compete for an abiotic or biotic resource. We consider both
consumer species specialized to a habitat patch, and generalist species capable
of using the resource throughout the metacommunity. We present analytical
results for different limiting values of consumer dispersal and resource
dispersal, and complement these results with simulations for intermediate
dispersal values. Our analysis reveals generic patterns for the combined
effects of consumer and resource dispersal on the metacommunity diversity of
consumer species, and shows that hump-shaped relationships between local
diversity and dispersal are not universal. Diversity-dispersal relationships
can also be monotonically increasing or multimodal. Our work is a new step
towards a general theory of metacommunity diversity integrating dispersal at
multiple trophic levels.
