Abstract
Conservation management agencies are faced with acute trade-offs when dealing with disturbance from human activities. We show how agencies can respond to permanent ecosystem disruption by managing for Pimm resilience within a conservation budget using a model calibrated to a metapopulation of a coral reef fish species at Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia. The application is of general interest because it provides a method to manage species susceptible to negative environmental disturbances by optimizing between the number and quality of migration connections in a spatially distributed metapopulation. Given ecological equivalency between the number and quality of migration connections in terms of time to recover from disturbance, our approach allows conservation managers to promote ecological function, under budgetary constraints, by offsetting permanent damage to one ecological function with investment in another.
Highlights
Disturbance in human-dominated environments often results in localized species extinction which can be alleviated by nonseasonal movement or migration between local populations [1]
When sub-populations were more localized recovery times increased to 29.3 time steps, but were still less than if there was no connections (s = 0.0) which recovered in 33.9 time steps
Our model showed how conservation networks of sub-populations can respond to disturbance and how the network characterization of the quantity and quality of connections between sub-populations affects the response to disturbance, in terms of recovery time
Summary
Disturbance in human-dominated environments often results in localized species extinction which can be alleviated by nonseasonal movement or migration between local populations [1]. Migration corridors that spatially connect local populations in a metapopulation vary in both quantity and quality and are known to influence recovery following a disturbance, and resilience [2,3]. A second-order goal, typically easier to measure and implement, is the ability of a population to ‘bounce back’ as rapidly as possible following a perturbation [5]; this is commonly referred to as rapidity (Pimm) resilience. A key challenge faced by environmental and conservation agencies is how to manage human activity and promote resilience and recovery from a negative shock in a metapopulation. Such management could involve deciding on whether to invest in
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