Population Viability Analysis

Review of Population Viability Analysis

Incorporating landscape stochasticity into population viability analysis.

The importance of incorporating landscape dynamics into population viability analysis (PVA) has previously been acknowledged, but the need to repeat the landscape generation process to encapsulate landscape stochasticity in model outputs has largely been overlooked. Reasons for this are that (1) there is presently no means for quantifying the relative effects of landscape stochasticity and popu...

Testing the Accuracy of Population Viability Analysis

Despite the growing use of population viability analysis (PVA), the predictions of these models rarely have been tested with field data that were not used in initially developing the model. We review and discuss a suite of methods that may be used to test the predictive ability of models used in PVA. In addition to testing mean predictions, appropriate methods must analyze the probability distr...

The use and abuse of population viability analysis.

A recent study by Brook et al. empirically tested the performance of population viability analysis (PVA) using data from 21 populations across a wide range of species. The study concluded that PVAs are good at predicting the future dynamics of populations. We suggest that this conclusion is a result of a bias in the studies that Brook et al. included in their analyses. We present arguments that...

Importance of Buffer Mechanisms for Population Viability Analysis

VOLKER GRIMM,∗§ ELOY REVILLA,† JÜRGEN GROENEVELD,∗ STEPHANIE KRAMER-SCHADT,∗ MONIKA SCHWAGER,‡ JÖRG TEWS,‡ MATTHIAS C. WICHMANN,‡∗∗ AND FLORIAN JELTSCH‡ ∗UFZ Umweltforschungszentrum Leipzig-Halle, Department Ökologische Systemanalyse, PF 500 136, D-04301 Leipzig, Germany †Department of Applied Biology, Estación Biológica de Doñana, Spanish Council for Scientific Research CSIC, Avenue Maria Luis...