Metapopulation biology is concerned with the dynamic consequences of migration among local populations and the conditions of regional persistence of species with unstable local populations. Well established effects of habitat patch area and Isolation on migration, colonization and population extinction have now become integrated with classic metapopulation dynamics. This has led to models that can be used to predict the movement patterns of individuals, the dynamics of species, and the distributional patterns in multispecies communities in real fragmented landscapes.