(Meta)population viability analysis: a crystal ball for the conservation of endangered butterflies ?
(2009) Ecology of Butterflies in Europe — ISBN: [978-0-521-76697-5], 339-352, published
Files
metanico.pdf
Restricted Access - Adobe PDF
- 223.64 KB
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- Butterflies are popular study organisms and their conservation status is relatively well known across Europe. Several species are considered endangered with conservation targets at the regional, national or pan-European or even global level. Management decisions about endangered species may benefit from guidelines based on the quanti- tative analysis of the predicted future of the considered (meta)population. Population viability analysis (PVA) is currently the main tool conservation biologists can use to determine whether a (meta)population is at risk of extinction, according to the various threats it faces. It made its debut in the 1970s, and has since then been developed and applied to several other endangered organisms, including butterflies. Environmental stochasticity is considered to be the dominant random force in large populations; demographic stochasticity has a real impact only in very small populations, or populations where the effective population size is limited (e.g. highly skewed sex-ratio). There is a controversy about the importance of genetics in the persistence of populations and the necessity to incorporate it into PVA. According to the way they incorporate spatial dynamics, there are three main categories of current PVA models for metapopulations: stochastic patch occupancy models (SPOM), structured population models (SPM) and individual-based models (IBM). Differences among the models are illustrated by an overview of butterfly PVA studies. Studies were rarely based on a complete set of estimated parameters; most used surrogate parameters or even parameters fixed arbitrarily to some specific value. This illustrates that one major problem of PVA is the availability of information to parameterise the models. The chapter also discusses a series of potential problems and how they could be solved. PVA should be considered as a useful tool that can be helpful in the selection of concurrent management scenarios, provided that the basic rules as highlighted in this chapter are respected.
- Affiliations
UMR CNRS-MNHN Muséum national d’histoire naturelle
Citations
Schtickzelle, N., & Baguette, M. (2009). (Meta)population viability analysis: a crystal ball for the conservation of endangered butterflies ? In Josef Settele, Tim Shreeve, Martin Konvika, Hans Van Dyck (ed.), Ecology of Butterflies in Europe (pp. 339-352). Cambridge University Press. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/151486