Map of predicted population openness on Ragged Island, Bahamas.Larvae disperse across patchy seascapes, and yet we typically assume that those seascapes are uniform. In a new paper in Ecological Applications, Malin and co-authors tease apart the consequences of this seemingly simple fact: Pinsky et al. 2012 Open and closed seascapes: Where does habitat patchiness create populations with high fractions of self-recruitment? As the title suggests, isolated habitat patches can have high self-recruitment, even without unusually short dispersal distances.
