Conclusions

• Local topography and microclimate have a dramatic impact on population dynamics, but the year-to-year variation in regional climate has a far larger impact.

• Habitat ``quality'' plays a role in patch occupancy, but patch distance from a large, persistent reservoir population plays a larger role.
  • Key conservation goal: protect the habitat areas that supports the reservoir populations in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties.

• Protection of habitat patches $>$ 7 km from reservoir population may not be necessary, but protection of patches $<$ 7 km is, even though those colonies may be subject to relatively frequent local extinctions. Protection of small, relatively low quality patches close to the reservoir population may be more important than protection of larger, higher quality patches further away.⁷

• Even with three decades of research behind it, much remains to be done be for an accurate, predictive model of population dynamics⁸ is available.
  • Successful parameterization of key factors affecting population persistence, but no estimates of variances - particularly difficult when year-to-year variation may be an order of magnitude or more

  • Factors other than topography affect resource availability, but they are poorly understood

  • Metapopulation dynamics are critical, but factors promoting successful colonization and the characteristics of effective dispersal corridors have not been established

• Focusing on genetic or local demographic factors in efforts to preserve populations with high local densities is often a misallocation of effort. Instead
  • Focus on identifying habitat features and resources that determine occupancy.

  • Distinguish between temporarily empty habitat and unsuitable habitat.

  • Find out why suitable habitat is unoccupied. (Recall that in a true metapopulation model, unoccupied but suitable habitat may be critical to long term persistence of a population.)

  • Do we really need a detailed, numerically accurate, predictive model of population dynamics in order to make reasonable conclusions about management right now?