The value of considering demographic contributions to connectivity: a review

Connectivity is a central concept in ecology, wildlife management, and conservation science. Understanding the role of connectivity determining species persistence increasingly important face escalating anthropogenic impacts on climate habitat. These augmenting processes can severely impact distributions community ecosystem functioning. One general definition that it an emergent process arising from set spatial interdependencies between individuals or populations, realistic representations are being sought. Generally, consists structural component, relating to distribution suitable unsuitable habitat, functional movement behavior, yet interaction both components often better describes ecological processes. Additionally, although implied by ‘movement', demographic measures such as occurrence abundance organisms regularly overlooked when quantifying connectivity. Integrating contributions based knowledge patterns critical understanding dynamics spatially structured populations. Demographically-informed draws fundamental concepts metapopulation ecology while maintaining conceptual developments landscape methodological development spatially-explicit hierarchical statistical models have potential overcome modeling data challenges. Together, this offers promising framework for developing ecologically metrics. This review synthesizes existing approaches advocates demographically-informed addressing current problems across fields reliant connectivity-driven population biology ecology. Using supporting simulations highlight consequences commonly made assumptions overlook contributions, we show even small amounts information greatly improve model performance. Ultimately, argue extending resolves long-standing challenges associated with accurately influence