Spatial structure can play a pivotal role in defining an ecosystem's biodiversity, as well as its stability and adaptive capabilities. Emerging in the 1960s, a new theoretical framework was developed in the field of ecology aimed at describing island ecosystems (MacArthur & Wilson, 1967), which quickly gained popularity and was applied to a wide range of ecosystems and even influenced policy-making (Wu & Vankat, 1995). Despite its impact, it largely remained a theoretical framework and many of its claims or hypotheses remained unverified experimentally (Wu & Vankat, 1995; Levin, 1992). In fact, later work pointed to some of the gaps in island theory and stressed the need to couple ecological and evolutionary dynamics, as well as emphasizing the relevance of the correct choice of scale in describing ecosystems (Levin, 1992).