Next-generation matrices for marine metapopulations: The case of sea lice on salmon farms.

Classifying habitat patches as sources or sinks and determining metapopulation persistence requires coupling connectivity between habitat patches with local demographic rates. While methods to calculate sources, sinks, and metapopulation persistence exist for discrete-time models, there is no method that is consistent across modeling frameworks. In this paper, we show how next-generation matrices, originally popularized in epidemiology to calculate new infections after one generation, can be used in an ecological context to calculate sources and sinks as well as metapopulation persistence in marine metapopulations.