10.5061/DRYAD.7F297
Drake, John M.
University of Georgia
Griffen, Blaine D.
University of Georgia
Data from: Experimental demonstration of accelerated extinction in
source-sink metapopulations
Dryad
dataset
2013
Source-sink
Daphnia magna
2013-09-03T20:42:18Z
2013-09-03T20:42:18Z
en
https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.713
23074 bytes
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CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Population extinction is a fundamental ecological process which may be
aggravated by the exchange of organisms between productive (source) and
unproductive (sink) habitat patches. The extent to which such source-sink
exchange affects extinction rates is unknown. We conducted an experiment
in which metapopulation effects could be distinguished from source-sink
effects in laboratory populations of Daphnia magna. Time-to-extinction in
this experiment was maximized at intermediate levels of habitat
fragmentation, which is consistent with a minority of theoretical models.
These results provided a baseline for comparison with experimental
treatments designed to detect effects of concentrating resources in source
patches. These treatments showed that source-sink configurations increased
population variability (the coefficient of variation in abundance) and
extinction hazard compared with homogeneous environments. These results
suggest that where environments are spatially heterogeneous, accurate
assessments of extinction risk will require understanding the exchange of
organisms among population sources and sinks. Such heterogeneity may be
the norm rather than the exception because of both the intrinsic
heterogeneity naturally exhibited by ecosystems and increasing habitat
fragmentation by human activity.
Data and computer codeContains readme file, comma separated data files,
and R codes for analyses reported in the paper.source-sink.zip