Journal article

Local connections and the larval competency strongly influence marine metapopulation persistence

Giorgia Cecino, Eric A Treml

ECOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS | WILEY | Published : 2021

Abstract

The relationship between metapopulation stability and connectivity has long been investigated in ecology, however, most of these studies are focused on theoretical species and habitat networks, having limited ability to capture the complexity of real-world metapopulations. Network analysis became more important in modeling connectivity, but it is still uncertain which network metrics are reliable predictors of persistence. Here we quantify the impact of connectivity and larval life history on marine metapopulation persistence across the complex seascape of southeast Australia. Our work coupled network-based approaches and eigenanalysis to efficiently estimate metapopulation-wide persistence ..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Funding Acknowledgements

We thank Stella Fulton and Martin Ingram for providing assistance with the eigenanalysis. Funding was provided through a Melbourne Research Scholarship to G. Cecino. Computational support was provided by the University of Melbourne's High Performance Computing system, Spartan. G. Cecino and E. A. Treml designed the study. Acquisition of the data was done by G. Cecino. G. Cecino performed the analysis, with support from E. A. Treml. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the results. G. Cecino drafted the manuscript with extensive input from E. A. Treml. All authors contributed to manuscript revisions and approved the final manuscript for publication.