TY - JOUR
T1 - Varying effects of connectivity and dispersal on interacting species dynamics
AU - Salau, Kehinde
AU - Schoon, Michael
AU - Baggio, Jacopo A.
AU - Janssen, Marcus
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Dr. Eli P. Fenichel and David Shanafelt - for helpful tips and comments during the editing phase of this article, Renate Mittelmann - for granting access to university resources for computational purposes, the Alfred P. Sloan foundation and the More Graduate Education at Mountain States Alliance (MGE@MSA) Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) National Science Foundation (NSF) Cooperative Agreement No. HRD-0450137 – for funding the first author throughout the development of this project, and two anonymous referees for their objective critique of this work.
PY - 2012/9/10
Y1 - 2012/9/10
N2 - Increased landscape fragmentation can have deleterious effects on terrestrial biodiversity. The use of protected areas, as islands of conservation, has limits to the extent of biodiversity conservation due to isolation and scale. As a result, there is a push to transition from solely developing protected areas to policies that also support corridor management. Given the complexities of multi-species interaction on a fragmented landscape, managers need additional tools to aid in decision-making and policy development. We develop an agent-based model (ABM) of a two-patch metapopulation with local predator-prey dynamics and variable, density-dependent species dispersal. The goal is to assess how connectivity between patches, given a variety of dispersal schema for the targeted interacting populations, promotes coexistence among predators and prey. The experiment conducted suggests that connectivity levels at both extremes, representing very little risk and high risk of species mortality, do not augment the likelihood of coexistence while intermediate levels do. Furthermore, the probability of coexistence increases and spans a wide range of connectivity levels when movement is less probabilistic and more dependent on population feedback. Knowledge of these connectivity tradeoffs is essential for assessing the value of habitat corridors, and can be further elucidated under the agent-based framework.
AB - Increased landscape fragmentation can have deleterious effects on terrestrial biodiversity. The use of protected areas, as islands of conservation, has limits to the extent of biodiversity conservation due to isolation and scale. As a result, there is a push to transition from solely developing protected areas to policies that also support corridor management. Given the complexities of multi-species interaction on a fragmented landscape, managers need additional tools to aid in decision-making and policy development. We develop an agent-based model (ABM) of a two-patch metapopulation with local predator-prey dynamics and variable, density-dependent species dispersal. The goal is to assess how connectivity between patches, given a variety of dispersal schema for the targeted interacting populations, promotes coexistence among predators and prey. The experiment conducted suggests that connectivity levels at both extremes, representing very little risk and high risk of species mortality, do not augment the likelihood of coexistence while intermediate levels do. Furthermore, the probability of coexistence increases and spans a wide range of connectivity levels when movement is less probabilistic and more dependent on population feedback. Knowledge of these connectivity tradeoffs is essential for assessing the value of habitat corridors, and can be further elucidated under the agent-based framework.
KW - Agent-based model
KW - Density-dependent dispersal
KW - Habitat connectivity
KW - Landscape fragmentation
KW - Metapopulation
KW - Predator-prey
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84863428607&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84863428607&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2012.04.028
DO - 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2012.04.028
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84863428607
SN - 0304-3800
VL - 242
SP - 81
EP - 91
JO - Ecological Modelling
JF - Ecological Modelling
ER -