Abstract
Meta-population and -community models have extended our understanding regarding the influence of habitat distribution, local patch dynamics, and dispersal on species distribution patterns. Currently, theoretical insights on spatial distribution patterns are limited by the dominant use of deterministic approaches for modeling species dispersal. In this work, we introduce a probabilistic, network-based framework to describe species dispersal by considering inter-patch connections as network-determined probabilistic events. We highlight important differences between a deterministic approach and our dispersal formalism. Exemplified for a meta-population, our results indicate that the proposed scheme provides a realistic relationship between dispersal rate and extinction thresholds. Furthermore, it enables us to investigate the influence of patch density on meta-population persistence and provides insight on the effects of probabilistic dispersal events on species persistence. Importantly, our formalism makes it possible to capture the transient nature of inter-patch connections, and can thereby provide short term predictions on species distribution, which might be highly relevant for projections on how climate and land use changes influence species distribution patterns.
Highlights
Meta-population and -community models have extended our understanding regarding the influence of habitat distribution, local patch dynamics, and dispersal on species distribution patterns
We study the homogeneous patch case first to focus on the influence of network based probabilistic connectivity (NPC) on system dynamics without any confounding effects of patch heterogeneity
We introduced our network based probabilistic connectivity (NPC) approach for fixed and rewiring networks to describe species dispersal in the context of meta-populations
Summary
Meta-population and -community models have extended our understanding regarding the influence of habitat distribution, local patch dynamics, and dispersal on species distribution patterns. In contrast to existing studies, the proposed framework allows to cover a broad range of connectivity scenarios, from all-to-all connected, to spatially explicit, and even captures the effects of transient and dynamic inter-patch connectivity over time This framework enables us to more realistically simulate connectivity on shorter time scales, while at the same time providing average connectivity characteristics in the long time limit, which are consistent with existing all-to-all connected (for higher patch densities) or other deterministic spatially realistic dispersal approaches. While we limit our investigations in this paper to meta-populations, this approach can be extended to meta-communities
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