Conservation Prioritization Using Metapopulation Models

Abstract

Abstract While nominally aiming to maximize species persistence, most methods for conservation planning use surrogates such as area, amount of habitat, or population size, rather than explicit measures of viability such as extinction risk (Chapter 2; Cabeza and Moilanen 2001, 2003). The difficulty lies in relating the landscape pattern, such as the area of habitat or its spatial configuration, to a biological benefit, such as species viability, with a sound basis in ecological theory. One of the principal ways of considering the effects of spatial configuration of habitat is to model the underlying spatial population processes. In highly fragmented landscapes consisting of networks of habitat fragments, this can be done within the metapopulation framework, which is based on the processes of the local extinction and colonization of patches of habitat. While some local populations may go extinct, the habitat patches can be repopulated by migrants originating from neighbouring patches, thus ensuring the persistence of the metapopulation as a whole (Hanski 1994; Verboom et al. 2001). In the metapopulation context, population viability becomes a function of the ecology of the species and the amount, quality, and spatial configuration of habitat.