  In ecology it is widely recognised that many landscapes comprise a network of
discrete patches of habitat. The species that inhabit the patches interact with
each other through a foodweb, the network of feeding interactions. The
meta-foodweb model proposed by Pillai et al. combines the feeding relationships
at each patch with the dispersal of species between patches, such that the
whole system is represented by a network of networks. Previous work on
meta-foodwebs has focussed on landscape networks that do not have an explicit
spatial embedding, but in real landscapes the patches are usually distributed
in space. Here we compare the dispersal of a meta-foodweb on \ER networks, that
do not have a spatial embedding, and random geometric networks, that do have a
spatial embedding. We found that local structure and large network distances in
spatially embedded networks, lead to meso-scale patterns of patch occupation by
both specialist and omnivorous species. In particular, we found that spatial
separations make the coexistence of competing species more likely. Our results
highlight the effects of spatial embeddings for meta-foodweb models, and the
need for new analytical approaches to them.
