ON SPATIOTEMPORAL CONNECTIVITY DYNAMICS: PERSPECTIVES FROM A NATURALLY FRAGMENTED METAPOPULATION

Drake, Joseph

Publication:
ON SPATIOTEMPORAL CONNECTIVITY DYNAMICS: PERSPECTIVES FROM A NATURALLY FRAGMENTED METAPOPULATION

dc.contributor.advisor	Christopher Sutherland
dc.contributor.advisor	Xavier Lambin
dc.contributor.advisor	Toni Lyn Morelli
dc.contributor.advisor	Lisa Komoroske
dc.contributor.author	Drake, Joseph
dc.contributor.department	University of Massachusetts Amherst
dc.date	2024-03-27T17:41:12.000
dc.date.accessioned	2024-04-26T15:47:45Z
dc.date.available	2024-04-26T15:47:45Z
dc.date.submitted	September
dc.date.submitted	2021
dc.description.abstract	Connectivity has quickly become a central tenet of ecological research, frequently evoked for conservation research and management activities. However, the concept of connectivity has proliferated into many forms for many different perspectives. Generally said, population distributions, demography, landscape, and dispersal all contribute to connectivity in a meaningful way. While great progress has been made in increasing realism in connectivity, one component seemed to stand out as being underappreciated: the role of population dynamics in the application of landscape connectivity. I began to acquire an appreciation for how common modeling approaches make assumptions about these core components of connectivity. In Chapter 1 I argue connectivity is a dynamic property of landscapes, influenced by population distributions, distribution of habitat, and dispersal behavior and present the conceptual demographically-weighted connectivity framework. Through computer simulations, I investigated the consequences of common assumptions to understand under which conditions each assumption was valid. In order to determine whether these theoretical simulation-based results applied in practice, I evaluated these assumptions empirically using a model system, the naturally fragmented mammalian metapopulation system in Assynt, Scotland, UK. In Chapter 2, I explore demographically-weighted connectivity and the implications of the common assumption that connectivity is a static component of the landscape. In chapter 3, I demonstrate that the characteristics of the inter-patch landscape, though which dispersal must occur for spatially structured populations to persist, matters when characterizing connectivity. The ability to uncover connectivity’s influence is only as good as our ability to detect our study species, and thus my final data chapter of the dissertation is a verification of emerging technological advances to measuring biodiversity and occupancy in the landscape using environmental DNA and camera trapping techniques. This dissertation helps provide evidence to the demographic nature of connectivity and how our modeling assumptions may impact the efficacy of conservation plans and management actions. This dissertation provide support for advances in both measuring and understanding occupancy and connectivity, both important to consider in a time of shifting conservation needs.
dc.description.degree	Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
dc.description.department	Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
dc.identifier.doi	https://doi.org/10.7275/24279887
dc.identifier.orcid	https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0458-3533
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/18617
dc.relation.url	https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3381&context=dissertations_2&unstamped=1
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
dc.source.status	published
dc.subject	connectivity
dc.subject	demographically-weighted connectivity; landscape connectivity; metapopulation; stochastic patch occupancy model
dc.subject	Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
dc.title	ON SPATIOTEMPORAL CONNECTIVITY DYNAMICS: PERSPECTIVES FROM A NATURALLY FRAGMENTED METAPOPULATION
dc.type	openaccess
dc.type	article
dc.type	dissertation
digcom.contributor.author	isAuthorOfPublication\|email:silverecology@gmail.com\|institution:University of Massachusetts Amherst\|Drake, Joseph
digcom.identifier	dissertations_2/2302
digcom.identifier.contextkey	24279887
digcom.identifier.submissionpath	dissertations_2/2302
dspace.entity.type	Publication