Figures
The checkerboard strategy.
Many experiments suggest that the sustainability of an ecosystem depends on its spatial structure; when a local subpopulation goes extinct the empty habitat patch is "rescued" by immigrants from nearby patches. Trying to protect endangered species via the construction of conservation corridors, the engineer faces a Goldilocks problem: weak migration does not allow for the rescue of empty patches; strong migration leads to spatial coherence and global extinction. In this work, the authors show that maximum sustainability is achieved when the migration rate is tuned to the value that yields a checkerboard spatial pattern (see Ben Zion et al., doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000643).
Image Credit: Gur Yaari (Yale University)
Citation: (2010) PLoS Computational Biology Issue Image | Vol. 6(1) January 2010. PLoS Comput Biol 6(1): ev06.i01. https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pcbi.v06.i01
Published: January 29, 2010
Copyright: © 2010 Ben Zion et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Many experiments suggest that the sustainability of an ecosystem depends on its spatial structure; when a local subpopulation goes extinct the empty habitat patch is "rescued" by immigrants from nearby patches. Trying to protect endangered species via the construction of conservation corridors, the engineer faces a Goldilocks problem: weak migration does not allow for the rescue of empty patches; strong migration leads to spatial coherence and global extinction. In this work, the authors show that maximum sustainability is achieved when the migration rate is tuned to the value that yields a checkerboard spatial pattern (see Ben Zion et al., doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000643).
Image Credit: Gur Yaari (Yale University)