Metapopulation Ecology

Saskya van Nouhuys, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

Published online: December 2009

DOI: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0021905

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 metapopulation models have been fit to empirical data. Although pure metapopulations may be rare, there are many empirical studies in which metapopulation processes, primarily local colonization and extinction, have been useful in explaining dynamics of natural and experimental systems. Metapopulation ecology is used in conservation biology and in population genetics where it influences genetic structure, the rate and trajectory of evolution and even what traits are under selection. Finally, communities of species that are distributed in a landscape potentially form metacommunity, which is a concept that shares important characteristics with metapopulations.

Key concepts:

  • A metapopulation is made up of semiindependent local populations.
  • In a metapopulation there is interplay between local and regional population dynamics.
  • While few species may live as metapopulations in the strict sense, many species depend on metapopulation processes. That is, a species regional persistence depends on asynchronous local dynamics and dispersal.
  • Predator–prey and competitive interactions may persist on a landscape scale due to metapopulation processes.

Keywords: conservation; metacommunity; population dynamics; population ecology; population genetics; spatial ecology

Figure 1. Illustration of metapopulation dynamics. Ellipses with dots are local populations and unfilled ellipses are empty habitat patches. In panel (a) the metapopulation is made up of five local populations. In panel (b), after one time step, there are still five local populations but one of them is newly colonized (green). One empty habitat patch is the result of a local extinction (red).
Figure 2. A schematic drawing of the arrangement of microcosms and the mean number of days that a predator population persisted. The % values beside each array show the connectedness of the bottles as the mean percentage of other bottles directly connected by tubes averaged across all bottles in each microcosm. Error bars are + or – SE. Persistence is unknown for predator populations that did not go extinct but was assumed to be 130 d, the duration of the experiment. Reproduced from Holyoak (2000) with permission of University of Chicago press.
Figure 3. The metapopulation dynamics of the butterfly Melitaea cinxia and the parasitoid Cotesia melitaearum from 1995 to 2007. The fraction of habitat patches occupied by the butterfly Melitaea cinxia (orange line) is always greater than the fraction of local host populations occupied by the parasitoid (blue line). A subset of these data is presented in van Nouhuys and Hanski (2002).
Figure 4. The hypothetical relationship between habitat fragmentation in a metapopulation and the allocation to dispersal (green line) and reproduction (red line). This assumes that mobility comes at a cost to reproduction.
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Community Structure | Population Ecology
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Article Title: Metapopulation Ecology
 
How to Cite close
van Nouhuys, Saskya(Dec 2009) Metapopulation Ecology. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester. http://www.els.net [doi: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0021905]