Slide 15 of 20
Notes:
One preoccupation in conservation biology has been whether there is a critical minimum size of habitat needed to support a given species. In the river habitat, this could be interpreted as a minimum length of river.
To understand the effects of population isolation, we took a fixed length of river and pretended to break it up into different length segments. This converts some of the habitat to reservoir. As the length of the segments decreased, the risk of extinction increased (opposite of persistence). The conversion of habitat did not make much of a difference until the segments became quite small.