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Exploring the dimensions of metapopulation persistence: a comparison of structural and temporal measures

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Abstract

The spatial arrangement of habitat patches in a metapopulation and the dispersal connections among them influence metapopulation persistence. Metapopulation persistence emerges from a dynamic process, namely the serial extinctions and recolonizations of local habitat patches, while measures of persistence are typically based solely on structural properties of the spatial network (e.g., spatial distance between sites). Persistence estimators based on static properties may be unable to capture the dynamic nature of persistence. Understanding the shape of the distribution of extinction times is a central goal in population ecology. Here, we examine the goodness of fit of the power law to patch persistence time distributions using data on a foundational metapopulation system—the Glanville fritillary butterfly in the Åland islands. Further, we address the relationship between structural measures of metapopulation persistence (i.e., metapopulation capacity) and our temporal distributional fits to patch persistence times based on a power law. Patch persistence time distributions were well fit by a power law for the majority of semi-independent networks. Power law fits to persistence time distributions were related to metapopulation capacity, linking structural and temporal measures of metapopulation persistence. Several environmental variables and measures of network topology were correlated with both measures of metapopulation persistence, though correlations tended to be stronger for the structural measure of metapopulation persistence (i.e., metapopulation capacity). Together, our findings suggest that persistence time distributions are useful dynamic properties of metapopulations, and provide evidence of a relationship between metapopulation structure and metapopulation dynamics.

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Data availability

R code is available on figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12576038.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the coordinators and volunteers who participated in the Åland island survey since 1993. The Research Centre for Ecological Change is funded by the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation. TAD thanks the Department of Mathematics at University of Rijeka for their hospitality.

This work has been performed with funding to Tad Dallas from the National Science Foundation (NSF-DEB-2017826) Macrosystems Biology and NEON-Enabled Science program.

Author contributions

TAD designed the study and performed the analyses. All authors contributed to manuscript writing.

Funding

The research was funded by the Academy of Finland (grant 309581 to OO), the Research Council of Norway (SFF-III grant 223257), and the European Research Council (Independent Starting grant no. 637412 ‘META-STRESS’ to MS)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Science, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    Tad A Dallas

  2. Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Research Programme, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 65, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Tad A Dallas, Marjo Saastamoinen & Otso Ovaskainen

  3. Helsinki Institute of Life Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Marjo Saastamoinen

  4. Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics, Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, N-7491, Trondheim, Norway

    Otso Ovaskainen

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  1. Tad A Dallas
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Correspondence to Tad A Dallas.

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Dallas, T.A., Saastamoinen, M. & Ovaskainen, O. Exploring the dimensions of metapopulation persistence: a comparison of structural and temporal measures. Theor Ecol 14, 269–278 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-020-00497-0

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