A complete understanding of population connectivity via larval dispersal is of great value to the effective design and management of marine protected areas (MPA). However empirical estimates of larval dispersal distance, self-recruitment, and within season variability of population connectivity patterns and their influence on metapopulation structure remain rare. We used high-resolution otolith...

Inbreeding causes reduction of genetic variability that may have severe fitness consequences. In spite of its potentially huge impact on viability and evolutionary processes especially in small populations, quantitative demonstrations of genetic and demographic effects of inbreeding in natural populations are few. Here, we examine the relationship between individual inbreeding coefficients (F) ...

The spatial dispersal of individuals plays an important role in the dynamics of populations, and is central to metapopulation theory. Dispersal provides connections within metapopulations, promoting demographic and evolutionary rescue, but may also introduce maladapted individuals, potentially lowering the fitness of recipient populations through introgression of heritable traits. To explore th...

This study investigates the effects of habitat fragmentation on an Angola black-andwhite colobus (Colobus angolensis palliatus) metapopulation in southern Kenya. 124 coastal forest fragments were surveyed in 2001. Fifty-five C. a. palliatus populations were found during this survey, (44% habitat patch occupancy), with an estimated national population estimate of 3,100 5,000 individuals. Colobus...

European Bison (Bison bonasus) barely escaped extinction in the early 20th century and now only occur in small isolated herds scattered across Central and Eastern Europe. The species’ survival in the wild depends on identifying suitable habitat for establishing bison metapopulations via reintroductions of new herds. We assessed European Bison habitat across the Carpathian Mountains, a stronghol...

Metapopulation ecology has historically been rich in theory, yet analytical approaches for inferring demographic relationships among local populations have been few. We show how reverse-time multi-state capture–recapture models can be used to estimate the importance of local recruitment and interpopulation dispersal to metapopulation growth. We use ‘contribution metrics’ to infer demographic co...

BACKGROUND Evolutionary change in individual species has been hypothesized to have far-reaching consequences for entire ecological communities, and such coupling of ecological and evolutionary dynamics ("eco-evolutionary dynamics") has been demonstrated for a variety systems. However, the general importance of evolutionary dynamics for ecological dynamics remains unclear. Here, we investigate h...

Traditional metapopulation theory classifies a metapopulation as a spatially homogeneous population that persists on neighboring habitat patches. The fate of each population on a habitat patch is a function of a balance between births and deaths via establishment of new populations through migration to neighboring patches. In this study, we expand upon traditional metapopulationmodels by incorp...

Managers of species that exist as metapopulations are faced with many decisions. In this paper we use a decision-theory framework to examine a fundamental management question: Should we focus on decreasing the local extinction probability of subpopulations by increasing the size of their patch, or should metapopulation viability be improved by constructing more patches? Using a spatially implic...

The primary focus of studies examining metapopulation processes in dynamic or disturbance-dependent landscapes has been related to spatiotemporal changes in the habitat patches themselves. However, like the habitat patches, opportunities for movement between patches can also exist intermittently in dynamic landscapes, creating transient connectivity windows - which we define as a period of time...