  Metacommunity theory is considered a promising approach for explaining
species diversity and food web complexity. Recently Pillai et al. proposed a
simple modeling framework for the dynamics of food webs at the metacommunity
level. Here, we employ this framework to compute general conditions for the
persistence of complex food webs in metacommunities. The persistence conditions
found depend on the connectivity of the resource patches and the structure of
the assembled food web, thus linking the underlying spatial patch-network and
the species interaction network. We find that the persistence of omnivores is
more likely when it is feeding on (a) prey on low trophic levels, and (b) prey
on similar trophic levels.
