The value of considering demographic contributions to connectivity: a review

Joseph Drake, Xavier Lambin, Chris Sutherland* (Corresponding Author)

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

19 Citations (Scopus)
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Abstract

Connectivity is a central concept in ecology, wildlife management and conservation science. Understanding the role of connectivity in determining species persistence is increasingly important in the face of escalating anthropogenic impacts on climate and habitat. These connectivity augmenting processes can severely impact species distributions and community and
ecosystem functioning. One general definition of connectivity is an emergent process arising from a set of spatial interdependencies between individuals or populations, and increasingly realistic representations of connectivity are being sought. Generally, connectivity consists of a structural component, relating to the distribution of suitable and unsuitable habitat, and a functional component, relating to movement behavior, yet the interaction of both components often better describes ecological processes. Additionally, although implied by ‘movement’, demographic measures such as the occurrence or abundance of organisms are regularly overlooked when quantifying connectivity. Integrating demographic contributions based on the knowledge of species distribution patterns is critical to understanding the dynamics of spatially structured populations. Demographically-informed connectivity draws from fundamental concepts in metapopulation ecology while maintaining important conceptual developments from landscape ecology, and the methodological development of spatially-explicit hierarchical statistical models that have the potential to overcome modeling and data challenges. Together, this offers a promising framework for developing ecologically realistic connectivity metrics.
This review synthesizes existing approaches for quantifying connectivity and advocates for demographically-informed connectivity as a general framework for addressing current problems across ecological fields reliant on connectivity-driven processes such as population ecology, conservation biology, and landscape ecology. Using supporting simulations to highlight the consequences of commonly made assumptions that overlook important demographic contributions, we show that even small amounts of demographic information can greatly improve model performance. Ultimately, we argue demographic measures are central to extending the concept of connectivity and resolves long-standing challenges associated with accurately quantifying the influence of connectivity on fundamental ecological processes
Original languageEnglish
Article numbere05552
Number of pages18
JournalEcography
Volume2022
Issue number6
Early online date24 Jun 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2022

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgements:
The authors would like to thank Dr. Benjamin Padilla, Dr. Toni Lyn Morelli, and the Wildthings Lab for significant feedback that helped improve the initial draft. We would also like to thank Dr. Robert Fletcher and 2 anonymous reviewers for exceptionally thorough and constructive feedback that greatly improved the manuscript.
We would like to thank Tina Sotis, Independent Artist, North Adams, MA, USA for her help in designing Figure 1.

Funding: No funding declared

Data Availability Statement

Data available from the Dryad Digital Repository: <https:// doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6hdr7sr16> (Drake et al. 2021)

Keywords

  • colonization-extinction
  • connectivity
  • dispersal
  • demographically-weighted connectivity
  • eco-evolutionary
  • spatiotemporal
  • dynamic
  • metapopulation
  • occupancy
  • resistance
  • SPOM

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