Profile of Ilkka A. Hanski

Abstract

Watching birds and collecting butterflies in the field behind his boyhood home, young Ilkka Hanski marveled at the isolated habitats in which many insects live. Decades later, the Director of the Metapopulation Research Group at the University of Helsinki in Finland admits that many of his most successful research projects on the study of metapopulations, or isolated yet interconnected populations of the same species, were inspired by childhood adventures in his own back yard. Hanski, elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2010, has helped predict how plant and animal populations respond when their habitats are broken into fragments, whether by urbanization, deforestation, climate change, or entirely natural processes. His studies have earned him the 2011 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, as well as election to the Royal Society, the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, and most recently, the NAS. Ilkka A. Hanski in the field. Before the 1970s, ecologists paid little attention to the spatial structure of populations, whether they were continuously distributed in space, assemblages of local populations, or a mix of both. In 1969, American population biologist Richard Levins first introduced the concept of a metapopulation. However, it was Hanski—who has since led the field of metapopulation biology through the development of basic concepts, models, and informative empirical examples—who helped gauge the prospects of long-term survival for species living in fragmented landscapes. Hanski's mathematical models have revealed how a collection of many small local populations survive in a network of habitat fragments. For the past 2 decades, Hanski has used the Glanville fritillary butterfly as a study system to fuel his models and to probe the ecological, genetic, and evolutionary consequences of habitat fragmentation. To date, Hanski's models have been used to predict the dynamics of animal and …