Metapopulations and Wildlife Conservation

Book Overview

Development of rural landscapes is converting once-vast expanses of open space into pockets of habitat where wildlife populations exist in isolation from other members of their species. The central... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1559634588
• ISBN13: 9781559634588
• Release Date: September 1996
• Publisher: Island Press
• Length: 439 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.8" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

A mostly strong collection of academic papers on metapopulations

This book is a scholarly edited volume based on a symposium on the theory and practice of "metapopulations" in wildlife biology. If you're unfamiliar with that term, think of a bunch of isolated blobs of wildlife with only occasional dispersal of animals from one habitat patch to another - - but enough such dispersal to exchange genes and recolonize patches whose populations go extinct. The intended audience is applied biologists and practitioners who manage wildlife populations and their habitats. Despite this more technical slant, most of the chapters are accessible to the interested lay person. A few chapters are real gems, such as one that applies metapopulation theory to Florida scrub jay populations. For those of us who aren't biologists, it does a great job explaining the theory of metapopulations for this species, applying the theory to a research project that documents the real-world distribution of the jays, and finally moving to the policy question of how best to manage that metapopulation. That chapter isn't alone in being both interesting and accessible. The book also has a few duds, and a couple of highly-mathematical chapters that will be most useful to people who work in wildlife population biology. If you're interested in this topic at more than a casual level, this is an important book and well worth reading.