Evaluating the metapopulation consequences of ecological traps

Abstract

Ecological traps occur when environmental changes cause maladaptive habitat selection. Despite their relevance to metapopulations, ecological traps have been studied predominantly at local scales. How these local impacts scale up to affect the dynamics of spatially structured metapopulations in heterogeneous landscapes remains unexplored. We propose that assessing the metapopulation consequences of traps depends on a variety of factors that can be grouped into four categories: the probability of encounter, the likelihood of selection, the fitness costs of selection and species-specific vulnerability to these costs. We evaluate six hypotheses using a network-based metapopulation model to expl..