The term 'metapopulation' was coined by:
Richard Levins introduced the term and formal concept of a metapopulation in the late 1960s while developing models of populations occupying temporary habitat patches. His classic formulation tracked the fraction of suitable patches occupied, balancing colonization of empty patches against extinction of occupied ones. This abstraction showed how a species could persist regionally even when individual local populations repeatedly vanished. Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson developed island biogeography, a closely related theory balancing immigration and extinction in island species richness, bu
Ref: Ecology: Concepts and Applications, Molles, 9th Ed., Ch. 9