A Next-Generation Approach to Calculate Source–Sink Dynamics in Marine Metapopulations.

In marine systems, adult populations confined to isolated habitat patches can be connected by larval dispersal. Source–sink theory provides effective tools to quantify the effect of specific habitat patches on the dynamics of connected populations. In this paper, we construct the next-generation matrix for a marine metapopulation and demonstrate how it can be used to calculate the source–sink dynamics of habitat patches. We investigate the effect of environmental variables on the source–sink dynamics and demonstrate how the next-generation matrix can provide useful biological insight into transient as well as asymptotic dynamics of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]