Genetic estimation of dispersal in metapopulation viability analysis

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Animal Conservation

Volume

13

Publication Date

2010

First Page

127

Last Page

128

Abstract

For geographically closed populations, it has long been known that the dynamics of rare populations are affected by demographic stochasticity, and that a short string of ‘bad luck’ (of the random variable demographic outcomes in a finite population) can easily drive rare populations to extinction. The commonly taught approximation for calculating this extinction risk, (where d, b and N0 are the respective death rate, birth rate, and initial abundance), clearly shows how sensitive population fate can be to initial abundance (Gotelli, 2008). However, when populations are geographically connected to others, immigration can ‘rescue’ rare populations from becoming extinct, and the connectivity of multiple populations created by dispersal greatly bolsters the persistence probability of the overall population. As dispersal amongst fragmented habitats increases a population becomes panmictic; overall abundance is enhanced through connectivity and the impact of demographic stochasticity on extinction risk decreases. Conversely, if dispersal is completely impeded by the loss of connectivity among habitat patches, the dynamics in each local population will be more greatly affected by local abundance, birth and death (Clobert et al., 2001). Between the realms of zero and panmictic dispersal resides the concept of a metapopulation (Levins, 1969, 1970).

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