Abstract

Landscape ecology is the study of the effect of spatial pattern on an ecological process. It thus follows that adopting a landscape ecological perspective to metapopulation dynamics entails understanding how a spatial pattern, such as habitat fragmentation or heterogeneity, affects the processes that contribute to the dynamics of spatially structured populations. This expanded perspective of landscape ecology is adopted in this chapter. This chapter demonstrates what a landscape ecological perspective can contribute toward understanding metapopulation dynamics, beyond the usual suggestions that landscape ecology offers a broader scale perspective or more spatially complex rendering of landscape structure; discusses how landscape structure is expected, or has been demonstrated, to affect various processes that affect metapopulation persistence, and thus extinction risk; assesses the implications of adopting a landscape ecological perspective for management and conservation; and identifies theoretical and empirical research needs that would help contribute to the further development of this “exciting scientific synthesis” between metapopulation biology and landscape ecology.

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