MetaSqueeze: A spatially-explicit metapopulation model for Banksia hookeriana in south-west Australia

Climate change, with warming and drying weather conditions, is reducing the growth, seed production, and survival of fire-adapted plants in fire-prone regions such as Mediterranean-type ecosystems. These effects of climate change on local plant demographics have recently been shown to reduce the persistence time of local populations of the fire-killed shrub Banksia hookeriana dramatically. In principle, extinctions of local populations may be partly compensated by recolonization events through long-distance dispersal mechanisms of seeds, such as post-fire wind and bird-mediated dispersal, facilitating persistence in spatially structured metapopulations. However, to what degree and under which assumptions metapopulation dynamics might compensate for the drastically increased local extinction risk remains to be explored. Given the long timespans involved and the complexity of interwoven local and regional processes, mechanistic, process-based models are one of the most suitable approaches..., , , # MetaSqueeze: A spatially-explicit metapopulation model for *Banksia hookeriana* in south-west Australia

MetaSqueeze is a mechanistic, process-based, spatially explicit metapopulation model developed to investigate the dynamics of metapopulations under the influence of climate change. This model specifically focuses on the fire-killed, serotinous shrub *Banksia hookeriana*, studying its response to varying fire regimes and climatic conditions.

**Reference:**
Souto-Veiga, R., Groeneveld, J., Enright, N. J., Fontaine, J. B., & Jeltsch, F. (2024). Climate change may shift metapopulations towards unstable source-sink dynamics in a fire-killed, serotinous shrub. *Ecology and Evolution, 14*, e11488. [https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.11488](https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.11488)

Corresponding Author:
Rodrigo Souto-Veiga
Email: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])
ORCID: [0000-0001-8639-620X](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8639-620X)

## Requirements

Th...