Overview: Perspectives on managing and measuring sources and sinks

Source-sink theory changes the way ecologists should think about species distributions:  Species occur in unsuitable habitat types (sinks) due to movement from suitable habitat patches (sources).  In other words, ecologists should not infer habitat needs from species’ distributions.  And yet we continue to use this shortcut, in part because of the difficulty of studying the joint effects of movement and demography.  I present an overview of the diversity of perspectives on source-sink dynamics, as well as my perspective – based on experience with both mechanistic and correlative models – on our ability to predict population responses to environmental change.