Anywhere but here: local conditions motivate dispersal in Daphnia

Adaptation to local ultraviolet radiation conditions among neighbouring Daphnia populations.

Understanding the historical processes that generated current patterns of phenotypic diversity in nature is particularly challenging in subdivided populations. Populations often exhibit heritable genetic differences that correlate with environmental variables, but the non-independence among neighbouring populations complicates statistical inference of adaptation. To understand the relative infl...

Random Dispersal vs Non-Local Dispersal

Random dispersal is essentially a local behavior which describes the movement of organisms between adjacent spatial locations. However, the movements and interactions of some organisms can occur between non-adjacent spatial locations. To address the question about which dispersal strategy can convey some competitive advantage, we consider a mathematical model consisting of one reaction-diffusio...

Sexual Psychopath Legislation: Is There Anywhere to Go but Backwards?

Spatial occurrence and colonisations in patch-tracking metapopulations: local conditions versus dispersal

We studied the relative importance of local variables and dispersal for the occurrence and colonisation of the epiphytic bryophytes Orthotricum speciosum (spore dispersed), and O. obtusifolium (spore and asexual gemmae) on aspen trees (‘patches’) in two forest landscapes (one old-growth and one fragmented) using multiple logistic regression. The relative importance of dispersal was quantified a...

Global dispersal reduces local diversity.

Metapopulation models and stepping-stone models in genetics are based on very different underlying dispersal structures, yet it can be difficult to distinguish the behaviour of the two kinds of models. We demonstrate a striking qualitative difference in the equilibrium behaviour possible with these two kinds of dispersal. If, in a local patch, there are multiple stable equilibria (and consequen...