The spatial spread of invading organisms is a major contemporary concern. We focus here on invasions in inherently fragmented habitats, such as freshwater systems, and explore the usefulness of metapopulation models in this context. Maximum-likelihood methods allow the estimation of colonization and extinction rates, as functions of habitat patch sizes and positions, from time series of presence/absence data. This framework also provides confidence intervals of these estimates and hypotheses tests. We analyze a previously unpublished 12-year survey of the spread of the introduced snail Tarebia granifera in 47 Martinican rivers. Simple metapopulation models reproduce with reasonable accuracy several quantitative aspects of the invasion, including regional abundance, spatiotemporal structure, and site-by-site colonization dates. Sensitivity analysis reveals that the invasion sequence depended strongly on metapopulation size (number of sites) and spatial structure (distances among sites). The invasion history has also been accelerated by stochastic events, as illustrated by a large, central river that happened to be colonized very early and served as an invasion pool. Finally, we discuss the benefits of this approach for the understanding of invasions in fragmented landscapes.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 12 February 2020.
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