Latest Metapopulation Stories

Predicting the risk of extinction is a complicated task, especially for species that migrate between breeding and wintering sites. Researchers at the University of Georgia and Tulane University have developed a mathematical model that may make such predictions more accurate. Their work appears in the early online edition of the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. "The concern is that for a lot of species, we don't know very much about their wintering grounds," said Richard Hall,...

The song of passerine birds is a conspicuous and exaggerated display shaped by sexual selection in the context of male-male competition or mate attraction. At the level of the individual, song is considered an indicator of male "˜quality'. Paola Laiolo and colleagues at the Spanish Council of Research (CSIC) studied the metapopulation system of the Dupont's lark in north-eastern Spain and found an association between individual song diversity and the viability of the population as a whole,...

In their article in the July 2005 issue of The American Naturalist, Yssa D. DeWoody, Zhilan Feng, and Robert K. Swihart (Purdue University) model species' occupancy within a patchy dynamic landscape. They derive deterministic persistence thresholds which depend jointly upon the spatial and temporal structure of the landscape, reinforcing the importance of spatio-temporal connectivity. This model has the potential to predict various consequences of different land-use strategies and thus serve...