Incorporating landscape stochasticity into population viability analysis

Abstract

The importance of incorporating landscape dynamics into population viability analysis (PVA) has previously been acknowledged, but the need to repeat the landscape generation process to encapsulate landscape stochasticity in model outputs has largely been overlooked. Reasons for this are that (1) there is presently no means for quantifying the relative effects of landscape stochasticity and population stochasticity on model outputs, and therefore no means for determining how to allocate simulation time optimally between the two; and (2) the process of generating multiple landscapes to incorporate landscape stochasticity is tedious and user-intensive with current PVA software. Here we demonstr..