DOI: 10.5061/dryad.6hdr7sr16
title: The value of considering demographic contributions to connectivity - a review

description: Connectivity is a central concept in ecology, wildlife management and
 conservation science. Understanding the role of connectivity in
 determining species persistence is increasingly important in the face of
 escalating anthropogenic impacts on climate and habitat. These
 connectivity augmenting processes can severely impact species
 distributions and community and ecosystem functioning. One general
 definition of connectivity is an emergent process arising from a set of
 spatial interdependencies between individuals or populations, and
 increasingly realistic representations of connectivity are being sought.
 Generally, connectivity consists of a structural component, relating to
 the distribution of suitable and unsuitable habitat, and a functional
 component, relating to movement behavior, yet the interaction of both
 components often better describes ecological processes. Additionally,
 although implied by ‘movement’, demographic measures such as the
 occurrence or abundance of organisms are regularly overlooked when
 quantifying connectivity. Integrating demographic contributions based on
 the knowledge of species distribution patterns is critical to
 understanding the dynamics of spatially structured populations.
 Demographically-informed connectivity draws from fundamental concepts in
 metapopulation ecology while maintaining important conceptual developments
 from landscape ecology, and the methodological development of
 spatially-explicit hierarchical statistical models that have the potential
 to overcome modeling and data challenges. Together, this offers a
 promising framework for developing ecologically realistic connectivity
 metrics. This review synthesizes existing approaches for quantifying
 connectivity and advocates for demographically-informed connectivity as a
 general framework for addressing current problems across ecological fields
 reliant on connectivity-driven processes such as population ecology,
 conservation biology, and landscape ecology. Using supporting simulations
 to highlight the consequences of commonly made assumptions that overlook
 important demographic contributions, we show that even small amounts of
 demographic information can greatly improve model performance. Ultimately,
 we argue demographic measures are central to extending the concept of
 connectivity and resolves long-standing challenges associated with
 accurately quantifying the influence of connectivity on fundamental
 ecological processes.
description: This file contains simulation code implemented in R that created
 data used in the manuscript DOI:10.1111/ecog.05552<br>  
 As well, The data the simulation code creates is provided as the
 simulation does take some time to run (up to several weeks depending on
 the parameter combinations). These will be found in 4
 zips, each  reflecting a different scenario found in the text.
 Combinations of the patch area to abundance relationship or it being
 disrupted; this intersects with whether those abundance are high or low
 within simulated patches. Within each of these will be found the model
 runs that correspond to combinations of 5 and 10 years and 30, 50, and 100
 patches.