PARENT SESSION
Oral Session # 90: Ecological Theory III: Modeling: Populations; Disease.
Presiding: K Dixon
Friday, August 8. 8:30 AM to 12:00 PM, SITCC Meeting Room 102.

(Re?)structuring our approach to source-sink metapopulation dynamics in marine systems.

Figueira, Will^*,1, ¹ Duke University Marine Lab, Beaufort, NC, USA

ABSTRACT- The use of source-sink metapopulation terminology in marine systems is steadily increasing. Conservation and management actions have brought about the need to more fully understand the spatial component of population dynamics in these systems towards the specific end of identifying the relative "quality" of different areas for the purpose of protection or regulation. While the application of the theory is certainly appropriate and potentially quite useful, some of the key conceptual features have been lost or simply misapplied in the translation from terrestrial systems. Of key importance here is the terrestrial bias towards habitat-level effects versus the marine bias towards dispersal-level effects. In this study I develop an analytical framework for conceptualizing and modeling source-sink dynamics in marine metapopulations. This theory is grounded in the work of terrestrial systems but retooled to account for the important role dispersal can play in marine systems. The end conceptual and analytical model tracks patch-level effects on the overall metapopulation and in so doing allows for us to evaluate the relative contributions of each patch within the metapopulation quantitatively--that is as either a source or a sink. I apply this framework to a simple metapopulation to demonstrate how the overall connectedness of the system can affect source-sink characterizations, especially when populations are regulated in a density-dependant manner. The framework I present here for considering source-sink metapopulations in marine systems combines habitat and dispersal characteristics to present an overall picture of patch-level contribution to the metapopulation. By linking these factors together we can evaluate the effectiveness of metapopulation-level management efforts and come to understand outcomes that would perhaps not have been otherwise anticipated.

Key words: source-sink dynamics, metapopulations, marine