(Joint work with Ross McVinish, University of Queensland)
Abstract: We propose a model for the presence/absence of a population occupying a collection of habitat patches. The model assumes that colonisation and extinction of the patches occur as distinct phases. Importantly, the local extinction probabilities are allowed to vary between patches. This permits an investigation of the effect of habitat degradation on the persistence of the population. The limiting behaviour of the model is examined as the number of habitat patches increases to infinity. This is done in the case where the number of patches and the initial number of occupied patches increase at the same rate and for the case where the initial number of occupied patches remains fixed.
Acknowledgement: This work is supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems
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Last modified: 27th September 2010