A challenge for conservation management is to understand how population and habitat dynamics interact to affect species persistence. In real landscapes, timing and duration of disturbances can vary, and species' responses to habitat changes will depend on how timing of dispersal and reproduction events relate to the landscape temporal structure. For instance, increasing disturbance frequency ma...

Climate change is known to shift species' geographical ranges, phenologies and abundances, but less is known about other population dynamic consequences. Here, we analyse spatio-temporal dynamics of the Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia) in a network of 4000 dry meadows during 21 years. The results demonstrate two strong, related patterns: the amplitude of year-to-year fluctuation...

We consider a discrete size-structured metapopulation model with the proportions of patches occupied by n individuals as dependent variables. Adults are territorial and stay on a certain patch. The juveniles may emigrate to enter a dispersers’ pool from which they can settle on another patch and become adults. Absence of colonization and absence of emigration lead to extinction of the metapopul...

Previous in situ studies of orchid population dynamics with conservation relevance have focused on one or a few populations in a limited area. Many species of orchids occur as hyperdispersed populations in ephemeral habitats (epiphytic, twig epiphytes, short lived or vulnerable host). In this contribution, we show that orchid populations that are patchily distributed and that exist in disturban...

Modelling metapopulation dynamics is a potentially very powerful tool for conservation biologists. In recent years, scientists have broadened the range of variables incorporated into metapopulation modelling from using almost exclusively habitat patch size and isolation, to the inclusion of attributes of the matrix and habitat patch quality. We investigated the influence of habitat patch and ma...

The only thing about Nature that is certain and absolute is patchiness in space and time. All landscapes are patchy over a range of scales as consequences of natural and anthropogenic processes. To understand the dynamics of hierarchically structured, heterogeneous systems, models are important in several ways. Models can be used to generate new hypotheses, to clarify and test existing hypothes...

This paper considers metapopulation models in the general sense, i.e. where the population is partitioned into sub-populations (groups, patches,...), irrespective of the biological interpretation they have, e.g. spatially segregated large sub-populations, small households or hosts themselves modelled as populations of pathogens. This framework has traditionally provided an attractive approach t...

Habitat loss and fragmentation has created metapopulations where there were once continuous populations. Ecologists and conservation biologists have become interested in the optimal way to manage and conserve such metapopulations. Several authors have considered the effect of patch disturbance and recovery on metapopulation persistence, but almost all such studies assume that every patch is equ...

Human-dominated landscapes often feature patches that fluctuate in suitability through space and time, but there is little experimental evidence relating the consequences of dynamic patches for species persistence. We used a spatially and temporally dynamic metapopulation model to assess and compare metapopulation capacity and persistence for red flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum) in experimen...