Research overview: metapopulation viability modeling for the Iberian lynx

Iberian lynx recovery has relied on metapopulation thinking, managing a set of connected subpopulations to spread risk and sustain gene flow. This overview surveys how population viability analyses integrate demography, prey availability, disease, connectivity, and climate to estimate extinction risk under alternative management strategies. It reviews how such models guided the species' recovery from fewer than a hundred individuals toward a larger, distributed population, and how climate scenarios are folded into long-term projections. The synthesis explains why the Iberian lynx is a textbook case of model-driven conservation, where coupling biological detail with climate forecasts changed which interventions were judged most likely to prevent extinction.