Sofie Vandewoestijne

TL;DR: The consequences of the presence and magnitude of different costs during different phases of the dispersal process, and their internal organisation through covariation with other life‐history traits are synthesised with respect to potential consequences for species conservation and the need for development of a new generation of spatial simulation models.

TL;DR: It is found that cost distances generated by habitat preferences explained dispersal rates better than did the Euclidian distances, or the connectivity estimate based on patch‐specific resistances (patch viscosity), which is a clear example of how landscape genetics can validate operational functional connectivity estimates.

TL;DR: The results suggest that dispersal is a very important factor maintaining genetic diversity in a metapopulation consisting of large high-density populations interconnected by considerable dispersal rates, and to ensure the long-term survival of populations, conservation actions should not be blindly based on patch area and structural isolation.

TL;DR: This ecological drift, i.e. the replacement of specialists by generalists in species assemblages is likely to be a general effect of habitat loss and fragmentation on natural communities.

TL;DR: A process combining high movement rate between neighbouring patches, long‐distance migration and rare extinction/recolonization is suggested to explain the observed genetic structure of the butterfly Aglais urticae.