Metapopulation dynamics and current issues in ecology
Mats Gyllenberg
Department of Mathematics, University of Turku, Finland
Abstract
Classical population models, both deterministic and stochastic,
usually assume that all individuals of the population live in the same
habitat and interact homogeneously with each other. Most natural
populations, however, have a spatial structure: there are several
geographically distributed habitat patches that can support local
populations, which interact via migration. Such a population of
populations is called a metapopulation. Patches may be of different
quality and local populations may be of different sizes and this
induces an additional structure on the metapopulation.
In this talk I shall describe some structured metapopulation models
and use them to address some problems of current ecological interest.
