  Decisions to disperse from a habitat stand out among organismal behaviors as
pivotal drivers of ecosystem dynamics across scales. Encounters with other
species are an important component of adaptive decision-making in dispersal,
resulting in widespread behaviors like tracking resources or avoiding consumers
in space. Despite this, metacommunity models often treat dispersal as a
function of intraspecific density alone. We show, focusing initially on
three-species network motifs, that interspecific dispersal rules generally
drive a transition in metacommunities from homogeneous steady states to
self-organized heterogeneous spatial patterns. However, when ecologically
realistic constraints reflecting adaptive behaviors are imposed -- prey
tracking and predator avoidance -- a pronounced homogenizing effect emerges
where spatial pattern formation is suppressed. We demonstrate this effect for
each motif by computing master stability functions that separate the
contributions of local and spatial interactions to pattern formation. We extend
this result to species rich food webs using a random matrix approach, where we
find that eventually webs become large enough to override the homogenizing
effect of adaptive dispersal behaviors, leading once again to predominately
pattern forming dynamics. Our results emphasize the critical role of
interspecific dispersal rules in shaping spatial patterns across landscapes,
highlighting the need to incorporate adaptive behavioral constraints in efforts
to link local species interactions and metacommunity structure.
