RESEARCH ARTICLE Metapopulation Persistence in Random Fragmented Landscapes

Habitat destruction and land use change are making the world in which natural populations live increasingly fragmented, often leading to local extinctions. Although local populations might undergo extinction, a metapopulation may still be viable as long as patches of suitable habitat are connected by dispersal, so that empty patches can be recolonized. Thus far, metapopulations models have either taken a mean-field approach, or have modeled empiri-cally-based, realistic landscapes. Here we show that an intermediate level of complexity be-tween these two extremes is to consider random landscapes, in which the patches of suitable habitat are randomly arranged in an area (or volume). Using methods borrowed from the mathematics of Random Geometric Graphs and Euclidean RandomMatrices, we derive a simple, analytic criterion for the persistence of the metapopulation in random frag-mented landscapes. Our results show how the density of patches, the variability in their value, the shape of the dispersal kernel, and the dimensionality of the landscape all contrib-ute to determining the fate of the metapopulation. Using this framework, we derive sufficient conditions for the population to be spatially localized, such that spatially confined clusters o