Ernst Mayr played a central role in the establishment of the general concept of species as metapopulation lineages, and he is the author of one of the most popular of the numerous alternative definitions of the species category. Reconciliation of incompatible species definitions and the development of a unified species concept require rejecting the interpretation of various contingent propertie...

Ernst Mayr played a central role in the establishment of the general concept of species as metapopulation lineages, and he is the author of one of the most popular of the numerous alternative definitions of the species category. Reconciliation of incompatible species definitions and the development of a unified species concept require rejecting the interpretation of various contingent propertie...

Immigrants to habitats occupied by conspecific organisms are usually expected to be competitively inferior, because residents may be locally adapted. If residents are inbred, however, mating between immigrants and residents results in offspring that may enjoy a fitness advantage from hybrid vigor. We demonstrate this effect experimentally in a natural Daphnia metapopulation in which genetic bot...

Biological invasions are not only a major threat to biodiversity, they also have major impacts on local economies and agricultural production systems. Once established, the connection of local populations into metapopulation networks facilitates dispersal at landscape scales, generating spatial dynamics that can impact the outcome of pest-management actions. Much planning goes into landscape-sc...

Conservation of species in fragmented landscapes often is guided by spatially realistic metapopulation theory. However, convincing cases of metapopulation dynamics are uncommon, especially for vertebrates. Moreover, there is concern that the patch area and isolation paradigm for metapopulations is an oversimplification for heterogeneous landscapes. We tested predictions from metapopulation theo...

Humans have altered nearly every natural disturbance regime on the planet through climate and land-use change, and in many instances, these processes may have interacting effects. For example, projected shifts in temperature and precipitation will likely influence disturbance regimes already affected by anthropogenic fire suppression or river impoundments. Understanding how disturbance-dependen...

Metapopulation models have been used to better understand the conditions necessary for the persistence of the metapopulation. In this paper, we study a stochastic patch occupancy model that incorporates variation in quality and connectivity of the habitat patches. Two important assumptions are imposed in our analysis. Firstly, the distance between patches has a special form. This amounts to ass...

Geographic structure can affect patterns of genetic differentiation and speciation rates. In this article, we investigate the dynamics of genetic distances in a geographically structured metapopulation. We model the metapopulation as a weighted directed graph, with N vertices corresponding to N homogeneous subpopulations. The dynamics of the genetic distances is then controlled by two types of ...

In a fragmented world, species survival depends on dispersal, as local populations at high risk of extinction could be rescued by immigration from neighboring populations. This intuition forms the core of metapopulation models: even though local populations occupying suitable habitat patches might undergo extinction, persistence can be achieved at the metapopulation level as long as individuals...

Recently researchers have gone to great lengths to measure marine metapopulation connectivity via tagging, genetic, and trace-elemental fingerprinting studies. These empirical estimates of larval dispersal are key to assessing the significance of metapopulation connectivity within a demographic context, but the life-history data required to do this are rarely available. To evaluate the demograp...