Metapopulations and their spatial dynamics

Abstract

The study of metapopulation dynamics has had a profound impact on our understanding of how species relate to their habitats. A natural, if naïve, set of assumptions would be that species are to be found wherever there is suitable habitat that they can get to; that species will rarely, if ever, be found in unsuitable habitat; that they will be most abundant in their preferred habitat; that species can be preserved as long as a good-size chunk of suitable habitat is conserved for them; and that destruction of a species’ habitat is always detrimental for its abundance. We will see that none of these reasonable-sounding assumptions is necessarily true. Metapopulation biology is a vast field, so to focus this chapter I will be guided partly by questions relevant to conservation biology. There are two important kinds of metapopulation. The so-called Levins metapopulation idea (Levins, 1970) is illustrated in Figure 4.1. It is imagined that patches of habitat suitable for a species are distributed across a landscape. Over time, there is a dynamical process of colonization and extinction: the colonization of empty patches by occupied patches sending out colonizing propagules and the extinction of local populations on occupied patches. This extinction can occur for a number of reasons. Small populations are prone to extinction just by the chance vagaries of the environment, reproduction, and death—environmental and demographic stochasticity (May, 1974b; Lande et al., 2003). An example of a species for which this is important is the Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia), which has been extensively studied by Hanski and colleagues (Hanski, 1999). This Scandinavian butterfly lives in dry meadows which are small and patchily distributed. Another reason for local population extinction is that the habitat patch itself may be ephemeral. For example, wood-rotting fungi will find that their patch ultimately rots completely away (Siitonen et al., 2005) and epiphytic mosses will ultimately find that their tree falls over (Snall et al., 2005). The second type of metapopulation consists of local populations connected by dispersal, but without the extinction of the local populations.