Mutualism, overexploitation and mobility in metacommunities with multi-trophic and plant-pollinator interactions
Informations
- Funding country
Netherlands- Acronym
- -
- URL
- -
- Start date
- 1/1/2000
- End date
- 12/31/2002
- Budget
- -
Fundings
| Name | Role | Start | End | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Other funding | Grant | 1/1/2000 | 12/31/2002 | - |
Abstract
In single-species metapopulation models, where population persistence depends on a balance between colonization and extinction of local habitat patches, increasing connectivity between patches decreases the risk of species extinction. Current environmental protection schemes, therefore, generally aim to increase metapopulation vitality by increasing connectivity. In metacommunities, consisting of multiple interacting species, no such simple relationship is to be expected between habitat connectivity and extinction risk. In case of consumer-resource interactions, increasing species mobility may cause cascading effects on lower trophic levels or even overexploitation of resources, potentially leading to the collapse of the entire food web and a 1055 of biodiversity. On the other hand, if interactions are mutualistic (e.g. plant-pollinator), species interactions may be over I y critical for colonization of new patches. For example, colonization of patches by plants depends on successful pollination, while pollinators are only attracted by non-isolated patches with sufficient plant diversity. This may cause strong non-linearities or even threshold phenomena in the colonization process with substantial consequences for the relationship between biodiversity and habitat connectivity. This research project aims at extending current metapopulation theory to account for multiple species and hence to determine when species interactions induce deviations in the assessment of extinction risk when compared to estimates on the basis of single-species metapopulations. Secondly, the project aims to derive rules-of-thumb for the direction and extent of this bias, ultimately leading to a refinement of the single- species algorithms that are currently used to assess the consequences of habitat fragmentation or detoriation and the spatial policies that are implemented to counter these degradations in our natural environment.