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A recovery programme for a population of Apollo butterflies in the Pieniny National Park was monitored over 12 years in order to assess its effectiveness. The programme was based on population ecology and metapopulation theory, and its object was to replenish wild populations with captive-reared individuals. Thanks to the adopted measures, the loca...
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... the period in which the reintroduction measures were carried out, the range of the Pieniny metapopulation of the Apollo butterfly expanded from the single subpopulation in the Trzy Korony massif to more than a dozen subpopulations living at almost all the major sites potentially suitable for this species within the Pieniny National Park (Fig. ...
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... These habitat patches are surrounded by forests, which hinder the butterflies' movement between them. The population structure has been described as a mixed-type metapopulation consisting of three metapopulation centres (Adamski and Witkowski 2007;Adamski and Ćmiel 2022;Fig. 1). ...
... The Apollo's population abundance is monitored every year using CMR (Adamski and Witkowski 2007;Adamski and Ćmiel 2022). During its flight period (June-September), each habitat patch is visited at least once a week. ...
... -they are the most stable and abundant parts of the metapopulation (Adamski, Witkowski 2007;Adamski, Ćmiel 2022); -throughout the study period they were surveyed by exactly the same pair of fieldworkers. ...
Understanding metapopulation structures is very important in the context of ecological studies and conservation. Crucial in this respect are the abundances of both the whole metapopulation and its constituent subpopulations. In recent decades, capture-mark-recapture studies have been considered the most reliable means of calculating such abundances. In butterfly studies, individual insects are usually caught with an entomological net. But the effectiveness of this method can vary for a number of reasons: differences between fieldworkers, in time, between sites etc. This article analyses catch effectiveness data with respect to two subpopulations of the Apollo butterfly (Parnassius apollo) metapopulation in the Pieniny National Park (Polish Carpathians). The results show that this parameter varied significantly between sites, probably because of differences in microrelief and plant cover. In addition, a method is proposed that will include information on catch effectiveness for estimating the sizes of particular subpopulations and will help to elucidate the structure of the entire metapopulation.
... Subsequently, the duration of the species' presence was calculated for each season. The phenology of the butterflies' appearance in the field varied significantly between years (Adamski, 2007;Zimmermann et al., 2011), reaching 28 d in the studied population (Table 1). Owing to such interseasonal phenological differences, dates were standardized by assigning a value of "1" to the date of the first observation in a given year. ...
... However, regardless of the reason for this asynchrony, it appears to be a factor significantly influ-encing metapopulation dynamics. It is worth mentioning that the degree of interseasonal asynchrony observed in the Pieniny metapopulations of clouded apollo and apollo butterflies (Adamski & Witkowski, 2007) is surprisingly high. Zimmerman et al. (2011), who studied several populations in a much larger area, found much smaller differences in phenology. ...
... This effect may be accelerated by sex-related differences in phenology. Butterflies of the genus Parnassius are significantly protandrous (Konvička & Kuras, 1999;Adamski & Witkowski, 2007;Adamski, 2008), which, particularly in small populations, may influence the reproductive success of the earliest male and the latest female to emerge (Adamski & Witkowski, 1999). Matter and Roland (2013) considered this phenomenon to be an important component of the demographic Allee effect observed in Parnassius smintheus. ...
This paper discusses the influence of phenology‐related intra‐seasonal asynchrony on metapopulation dynamics and stability. As the part played by intra‐seasonal asynchrony is as yet unclear and poorly described, greater account of it should be taken in both metapopulation research and conservation practice. The subpopulations of the Parnassius mnemosyne metapopulation studied here are strongly isolated because of the phenological shift between them, despite the relatively small physical distances between them. This isolation is the result of a significant temporal shift in the species’ flight periods in the main metapopulation centres: in some seasons its flight times in the different subpopulations did not overlap at all. The predicted results of such strong intra‐seasonal asynchrony are not altogether clear. On the one hand, they reduce the vulnerability of the entire metapopulation to the effects of short‐term random disasters. On the other, the ever‐greater isolation of subpopulations may cause the metapopulation to become a nonequilibrium one, which will have a serious impact on its long‐term survival.
... Establishing a captive breeding population is expensive (Adamski and Witkowski 2007) and can take years to achieve (Xia et al., 2014;Canessa et al., 2016a), but when managed effectively they have the potential to produce individuals that have high survival and reproductive rates once released into the wild. ...
Reintroductions are becoming an increasingly popular tool for threatened species management and broader scale restoration projects. Reintroductions require a series of important decisions to be made from planning and implementation through to postrelease establishment and persistence of populations. Decision making in reintroduction is frequently impeded by high levels of uncertainty. Linguistic, epistemic and aleatory uncertainties often lead to a failure to meet project objectives. This has led to repeated calls for setting clear objectives and using these to focus monitoring in a way that allows applied science to support management. // Viewed in this way, applied science can naturally assist the decision making process. It is important to reduce only the uncertainties that will help inform the choice between two or more possible actions. These can be reduced through targeted monitoring and research. The failure of applied science to approach research in this way is one possible explanation for the ‘research –implementation gap’ that persists in conservation biology. Throughout this thesis I use decision analytic tools to evaluate and inform the discipline of reintroduction biology. Decision analytic tools are increasingly being utilised in diverse fields of resource management. The benefits for more formally incorporating decision science into conservation biology are obvious and repeatedly lauded, yet it remains unclear how much the approach is used to ensure applied science is truly informing management, particularly in the growing discipline of reintroduction biology. // Overall, my PhD intends to promote the application of formal decision tools to threatened species management and showcase how it can reduce uncertainty and support decision making specifically in reintroductions. In using the Regent Honeyeater recovery actions as a case study, I will evaluate whether management actions to recover the species are working, as well as highlighting areas where resources can be targeted to reduce the uncertainties that influence management decisions, rather than wasting it on those that are not relevant.
... The spatio-temporal approach, the core of the metapopulation theory (Gilpin and Hanski 1991;Hanski et al. 1996;Schnell et al. 2013;Porter and Ellis 2011), primarily addresses the relation between habitat structure and population dynamics (Gering et al. 2003;Hughes et al. 2000;Bulman et al. 2007). It enables a more reliable description of a population's decline, and the subsequent design of effective conservation measures (Harrison 1991;Adamski and Witkowski 2007;Cormont et al. 2011;Hanski 2011). In conservation practice, however, application of the metapopulation model is often limited by gaps in the knowledge of both population dynamics parameters and the habitat requirements of species (Cushman 2006;Rudnick et al. 2012). ...
... The presence of ecological traps in an area inhabited by a population causes the quality of the local habitat to deteriorate, even though other parameters, such as the availability of critical resources, are maintained. As habitat quality is considered to be the key factor responsible for the success of conservation efforts related to insect populations (Adamski and Witkowski 2007;Sutherland et al. 2013), it is important to recognise whether it is impoverished by ecological traps. ...
Although the negative impact of timber stacks on populations of saproxylic beetles is a well-known phenomenon, there is relatively little data concerning the scale of this impact and its spatial aspect. Beech timber stored in the vicinity of the forest can act as an ecological trap for the Rosalia longicorn (Rosalia alpina), so in this study we have attempted to determine the spatial range of the impact of a network of timber stacks. Timber stacks in the species’ range in the study area were listed and monitored during the adult emergence period in 2014–2016. Based on published data relating to the species’ dispersal capabilities, buffers of four radii (500, 1000, 1600, 3000 m) were delineated around the stacks and the calculated ranges of potential impact. The results show that the percentage of currently known localities of the Rosalia longicorn impacted by stacks varies from 19.7 to 81.6%, depending on the assumed impact radius. The percentage of forest influenced by timber stacks was 77% for the largest-radius buffer. The overall impact of the ecological trap network is accelerated by fragmentation of the impact-free area. It was also found that forests situated close to the timber stacks where the Rosalia longicorn was recorded were older and more homogeneous in age and species composition than those around stacks where the species was absent. Such results suggest that timber stacks act as an ecological trap in the source area of the local population.
... Another management action might be the translocation of eggs, caterpillars or adults from the known populations to nearby appropriate areas, for example, in our study population areas B and C in Fig. 2. Translocation is a measure of common use in conservation actions (Seddon et al., 2007) that may result in the founding of new populations but should be considered with caution. Some experiences with captive breeding and reintroduction of apollos in Europe point out to the need of using a large number of individuals in the reintroductions and also that many of the new populations founded are not stable and represent sinks that need continuous input of individuals to be maintained (Adamski & Wirkowski, 2007;Fred & Brommer, 2015). ...
• Parnassius apollo filabricus is a subspecies of apollo (Lepidoptera, Papilionidae) restricted to the Sierra de Baza‐Filabres range in southeastern Spain that has become increasingly rare in the last decades, disappearing from most of its known locations.
• In this article, we calculate both census and effective population size of a local population discovered in 2009 that occupies c. 30 ha.
• After 2 years of capture–mark–recapture work we estimate a population size of about 100 individuals.
• Genetic variation was characterised using 9 microsatellite markers and 29 individuals. Effective population size was estimated from 13 microsatellites. The studied population is strongly differentiated from the nearby Sierra Nevada apollo populations, and its expected heterozygosity and allelic richness were higher than the average value for Sierra Nevada.
• Genetic diversity of the population is not as low as expected by its small size, which points out to a recent population decline. We discuss the implications of these results for the conservation of the species.
... P. smintheus inhabits alpine and sub-alpine meadows in the Rocky Mountains of North America from Mexico to British Columbia (). It is not endangered, but other members of the Parnassius genus have been sources of conservation efforts (Adamski and Witkowski, 2007). It is semelparous, with one synchronous reproductive period per year. ...
Environmental changes are forcing many species to track suitable conditions or face extinction. In this study, we use a two-dimensional integrodifference equation to analyze whether a population can track a habitat that is moving due to climate change. We model habitat as a simple rectangle. Our model quickly leads to an eigenvalue problem that determines whether the population persists or declines. After surveying techniques to solve the eigenvalue problem, we highlight three findings that impact conservation efforts such as reserve design and species risk assessment. First, while other models focus on habitat length (parallel to the direction of habitat movement), we show that ignoring habitat width (perpendicular to habitat movement) can lead to overestimates of persistence. Dispersal barriers and hostile landscapes that constrain habitat width greatly decrease the population's ability to track its habitat. Second, for some long-distance dispersal kernels, increasing habitat length improves persistence without limit; for other kernels, increasing length is of limited help and has diminishing returns. Third, it is not always best to orient the long side of the habitat in the direction of climate change. Evidence suggests that the kurtosis of the dispersal kernel determines whether it is best to have a long, wide, or square habitat. In particular, populations with platykurtic dispersal benefit more from a wide habitat, while those with leptokurtic dispersal benefit more from a long habitat. We apply our model to the Rocky Mountain Apollo butterfly (Parnassius smintheus).
... Removing individuals from an already small and vulnerable population entails risk. Some reintroduced populations will not survive without constant sourcing of new individuals, and others may fail completely (Adamski & Witkowski 2007). Additionally, traits that are adaptive to captivity can develop in as little as 1 year, resulting in fitness declines (Christie et al. 2012). ...
Captive rearing can be a successful short-term strategy for protecting species threatened with extinction, by bolstering existing populations, or establishing new ones. Improving the success of captive rearing requires specific prior ecological knowledge, for example habitat and climatic requirements. Here, we report on the captive rearing of the critically endangered Canterbury knobbled weevil Hadramphus tuberculatus (Pascoe, 1877). Only a single population of H. tuberculatus is known, with an estimated population size of fewer than 100 individuals; as such, captive rearing provides an opportunity to augment the remaining population and potentially to allow the establishment of new populations, if suitable sites can be found. We successfully reared two F1 generation adults and two live larvae were recovered at the end of the project. We use a qualitative spatial analysis to determine the location of possible sites for reintroduction of H. tuberculatus. The spatial analysis suggests that there is little suitable habitat remaining for new H. tuberculatus populations. Our study provides guidelines for future captive breeding programmes and highlights the risks of removing individuals from an already vulnerable, small population.
... P. smintheus inhabits alpine and sub-alpine meadows in the Rocky Mountains of North America from Mexico to British Columbia (). It is not endangered, but other members of the Parnassius genus have been sources of conservation efforts (Adamski and Witkowski, 2007). It is semelparous, with one synchronous reproductive period per year. ...
Integrodifference equations have recently been used as models for populations undergoing climate-driven habitat movement. In these models, the persistence of a population is governed by the maximal or dominant eigenvalue of a Fredholm integral equation with an asymmetric kernel; this eigenvalue determines the critical translational speed for extinction of the population. Since direct methods for finding eigenvalues are often analytically or computationally expensive, we explored the extensive literature on alternative methods for localizing maximal eigenvalues. We found that a sequence of iterated row sums provide upper and lower bounds for the maximal eigenvalue. Alternatively, arithmetic and geometric symmetrization yield upper and lower bounds. Geometric symmetrization is especially valuable and leads to a simple Rayleigh quotient that can be used to analytically approximate the critical-speed curve. Our research sheds new light on the interpretation and limitations of the average-dispersal-success approximation; it also provides a generalization of this useful tool for asymmetric kernels.
Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Inc.
... In biological examples, however, the key is often not the occurrence of the resource alone, but also that it occurs in certain quantities. The example of such a situation could be the presence of shoots of a host plant required to maintain the assumed population abundance of an insect [45]. In the suggested approach, the interpretation of such a case is a situation where a greater number of resource occurrence is required ( ) min 1 R > , and the probability of the occurrence of PSE, is equal to the sum of probabilities of the occurrence of smaller quantities of the resource R being smaller than required ...
The problem of habitat fragmentation is recently an important issue in ecological research as well as in the practical approach of nature conservation. According to the most popular approaches, habitats are considered as the homogenous parts of the landscape. Also the metapopulation con-cept problem of the inert habitat heterogenity is considered quite seldom. These approaches have some weak points resulting from the assumption that the border between habitat patches and the metapopulation matrix is fairly sharp. This paper presents a resource-based concept of habitats, based on mathematical theory of point processes, which can be easily applied to analysing the problem of uneven distribution of resources. The basic assumption is that the random distribution of resources may be mathematically described as the realisation of a certain point process. Ac-cording to our method, it is possible to calculate the expected quantities of available resources as well as the minimum area of habitat that includes the expected abundance of the resource. This approach may be very useful to understand some crucial phenomena in landscape ecology, such as the patch size effect and its connection to habitat loss and fragmentation.
... In recent years, several studies and simulation models have been conducted to evaluate genetic adaptation, effective number of breeders and maintenance of genetic variability in captive breeding programs (e.g., Bentsen and Olesen 2002;Duchesne and Bernatchez 2002;Gautschi et al. 2003;Adamski and Witkowski 2007;Blanchet et al. 2008;Saura et al. 2008;Robert 2009;Williams and Hoffman 2009). It seems evident, however, that the conclusions cannot be extrapolated to all endangered taxa due to their idiosyncrasies (Hedrick and Kalinowski 2000). ...
The captive breeding of highly endangered species is considered to be an indispensable instrument when the natural habitats of those species are extremely degraded and/or when the effective population sizes are so reduced that there is an eminent risk of extinction (Bentsen and Olesen 2002; Maitland and Morgan 2002; Faria et al. 2010). Several authors agree that captive breeding pro-grams do not completely solve conservation problems and should only be adopted as a safeguard against species extinction until the natural habitats are restored and the animals can be reintroduced into their original habitats under appropriate conditions (Johnson and Jensen 1991; Philippart 1992; Caughley and Gunn 1996; Näslund 1998; Snyder et al. 1999; Berejikian 2000; Bobori et al 2001; Maitland and Morgan 2002; Schönhuth et al. 2003), a strategy known as supportive breeding (Wang and Ryman 2001). This strategy has been applied in several countries when it is urgent to preserve fish populations in consider-able risk of extinction (Cambray 1997; Arkush and Siri 2001; Schönhuth et al. 2003; CIP El Palmar 2006; Cardoso and Carrapato 2008; Kitanishi et al. 2013). Indeed, a vast array of factors is threatening freshwater fishes at a global scale (Duncan and Lockwood 2001). The Mediterranean populations are among the most threatened (Hermoso and Clavero 2011) due to the intro-duction of alien species, impoundment of rivers, habitat degradation and fragmentation, summer droughts and water quality deterioration (Collares-Pereira and Cowx 2004). In the Iberian Peninsula there is a consistent spatial relationship between the incidence of threats and the level of imperilment of species, whereby the presence of inva-sive species and the water extraction are the main drivers of native fish declines (Clavero et al. 2010). With the ten-dency for global warming, the typical summer droughts in Iberia are expected to become more intense and extended in time. This could pose an additional extinction risk factor for the Portuguese native cyprinid fish species, around 67 % of which are already considered to be ''Threatened'', ''Vulnerable'' or ''Critically endangered'' according to the Portuguese Red Book [Cabral et al. 2005; Electronic Supplementary Material (ESM) Table S1]. These species are small cyprinids with no economical value, which show restricted geographic ranges and low levels of genetic diversity (Sousa-Santos et al. 2013). A pioneer project of supportive breeding of critically endangered endemic fish species started in 2007 with nine populations belonging to six endangered and critically endangered cyprinid species endemic to the Iberian Pen-insula: Achondrostoma occidentale, Iberochondrostoma almacai, Iberochondrostoma lusitanicum, Squalius pyre-naicus, Squalius aradensis and Squalius torgalensis (Fig. 1; Table 1). In this paper we describe the imple-mentation and major results of this project and discuss the advantages of the adopted breeding scheme. Also, potential disadvantages of supportive breeding programs targeting endangered fish species are discussed. Ex situ conditions and the adoption of a ''naturalistic approach'' of reproduction. Following the research Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10228-013-0383-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
