Biography
Education:
- MSc University of Helsinki (Finland)
- DPhil University of Oxford (UK)
Memberships:
- Foreign Member of the Royal Society (UK)
- Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (USA)
- Foreign Member of Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)
- Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters (Finland)
- Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (UK)
- Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Sweden)
- Member of the Academia Europaea
Research Interests:
Metapopulation biology addresses the ecological, genetic, evolutionary and conservation consequences of habitat fragmentation. The concept was introduced to the literature in the late 1960s, but it was only in the late 1980s that research started to expand. At present, metapopulation biology is a distinct field of population biology. Hanski and his colleagues have developed a new family of metapopulation models that effectively integrate spatial population ecology with population-oriented approaches in landscape ecology. These models can be parameterized with empirical data and used for making predictions about the population consequences of habitat loss and fragmentation. A key component of Hanski¿s research is a large-scale and long-term research project on the Glanville fritillary butterfly (/Melitaea cinxia/), which was started on the Åland Islands in Finland in 1991. This project is unique in its spatial scale and the way empirical and modelling studies have been woven together. The Glanville fritillary metapopulation represents one of the few effective model systems in population biology. The extensive long-term information that is available for this system has allowed addressing research questions that would be practically impossible to study with other species, such as the extinction threshold in the occurrence of species in fragmented landscapes, the effect of inbreeding on population dynamics, and the coupling of fast evolutionary dynamics with spatial demographic dynamics.
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