A metapopulation is a spatially structured population that persists over time as a set of local populations in balance between local extinction and colonization. Starting in 1969, and accelerating since the early 1990s, mathematical models of metapopulations have shown the importance of landscape connectivity and dispersal for persistence of a species or of interacting species. Some metapopulat...

Ecologists are challenged to construct models of the biological consequences of habitat loss and fragmentation. Here, we use a metapopulation model to predict the distribution of the Glanville fritillary butterfly during 22 years across a large heterogeneous landscape with 4,415 small dry meadows. The majority (74%) of the 125 networks into which the meadows were clustered are below the extinct...

Disturbances affect metapopulations directly through reductions in population size and indirectly through habitat modification. We consider how metapopulation persistence is affected by different disturbance regimes and the way in which disturbances spread, when metapopulations are compact or elongated, using a stochastic spatially explicit model which includes metapopulation and habitat dynami...

Analytically tractable metapopulation models usually assume that every patch is identical, which limits their application to real metapopulations. We describe a new single species model of metapopulation dynamics that allows variation in patch size and position. The state of the metapopulation is defined by the presence or absence of the species in each patch. For a system of n patches, this gi...

We introduce a metapopulation model that includes both landscape changes (patch destruction and recreation) and age-dependent metapopulation dynamics. A threshold quantity is derived and related to the existence of an ecologically nontrivial equilibrium, to the stability of the speciesfree equilibrium, and to weak and strong persistence of the species. We provide examples to illustrate how age-...

Metapopulation theory for a long time has assumed dispersal to be symmetric, i.e. patches are connected through migrants dispersing bi-directionally without a preferred direction. However, for natural populations symmetry is often broken, e.g. for species in the marine environment dispersing through the transport of pelagic larvae with ocean currents. The few recent studies of asymmetric disper...

Models of metapopulations have focused on the effects of extinction and colonization rate upon metapopulation persistence and dynamics, assuming static landscapes wherein patches are neither created nor go extinct. However, for species living in ephemeral (patchy) habitats, landscapes are highly dynamic rather than static. In this article, we develop a lattice metapopulation model, of the patch...

Wu, J., Vankat, J.L. and Barlas, Y., 1993. Effects of patch connectivity and arrangement on animal mctapopulation dynamics: a simulation study. Ecol. Modelling, 65: 221-254. We constructed a simulation model of metapopulation dynamics consisting of two or three habitat patches using STELLA. our simulations show that, given the assumptions of the deterministic model, the metapopulation is doomed...

We use the theory of noise-induced phase synchronization to analyze the effects of demographic noise on the synchronization of a metapopulation of predator-prey systems within a fluctuating environment (Moran effect). Treating each local predator-prey population as a stochastic urn model, we derive a Langevin equation for the stochastic dynamics of the metapopulation. Assuming each local popula...

We develop a stochastic metapopulation model that accounts for spatial structure as well as within patch dynamics. Using a deterministic approximation derived from a functional law of large numbers, we develop conditions for extinction and persistence of the metapopulation in terms of the birth, death and migration parameters. Interestingly, we observe the Allee effect in a metapopulation compr...