PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 20: Modeling Animal Populations
Monday, August 8, 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM, Meeting Room 513 C, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Construction and perturbation analysis of a multi-habitat periodic matrix population model for Peromyscus leucopus.
Grear, Jason1, Burns, Catherine2, 1 US EPA / ORD / Atlantic Ecology Division, Narragansett, RI, USA2 Yale University - Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, New Haven, CT, USA
ABSTRACT- We present a matrix model that explicitly incorporates spatial habitat structure and demographic seasonality for a Peromyscus leucopus population in southern New England. Most demographic population models do not include spatial habitat structure, although modeled organisms often move through heterogeneous landscapes. Also, temporally distributed processes such as seasonality are typically subsumed into models with annual time increments. While these simple models require fewer data, such spatial and temporal abstractions limit the power to explore stressors that can occur in a subset of an individual's home range or during a discrete phase of a life cycle. Spatially explicit individual-based models can address this problem, but they are more difficult to construct, apply and modify. More explorations of models that lie between the extremes of total abstraction and total realism are needed. To this end, we extended demographic models to an intermediate level of realism using periodic (i.e., seasonal) projection matrices that incorporate stage- and habitat-specific classification of survival, reproduction and movement. Here we focus on model parameterization for a P. leucopus population, application of a recently described vector-permutation method for integrating separate matrix representations of demography and dispersal, and the analytical perturbation analyses that were made possible by this approach. Our results provide testable insights into the importance of specific habitats and movement patterns that would not have emerged from a simpler approach. Such insights can provide essential support for management options that aim to address seasonal or spatially discrete environmental change.
Key words: matrix population model, spatial ecology, habitat loss, Peromyscus leucopus