The Metapopulation Approach, Its History, Conceptual Domain, and Application to Conservation

Publisher Summary This chapter reviews and analyzes the spread of the metapopulation concept to conservation biology and applications. The metapopulation concept has now been firmly established in population biology. Two key premises in this approach to population biology are that populations are spatially structured into assemblages of local breeding populations, and that migration among the local populations has some effect on local dynamics, including the possibility of population reestablishment following extinction. These premises contrast with those of standard models of demography, population growth, genetics, and community interaction that assume a panmictic population structure, with all individuals equally likely to interact with any others. The focus on metapopulations, combined with that on genetics, has led to the population and the species becoming the dominant levels of concern in conservation. It is striking that the recent explosion of interest in ecosystem management is quite antithetic to a primary interest in populations and to single species management. Ecosystem management and metapopulation models share a concern with landscapes and regions, rather than highly local settings, and one could imagine a landscape with a distribution of habitat patches that would maintain many metapopulations simultaneously.