Integrating demography and population genetics through landscape genetics

Abstract

Landscape genetics has been a highly productive discipline in the latest decades promoted by the advent of highly variable molecular markers and, more recently of next generation sequencing tools, combined with an exhaustive characterization of the phenotype and the environmental heterogeneity. The most relevant goals addressed in the latest decades are: (1) providing an exhaustive inventory of biodiversity at the genetic, population and species level; (2) identifying genetic patterns across the landscape and the ecological factors that shape them; (3) assessing the contemporary and/or historical evolutionary processes that determine current observed genetic patterns (e.g., migration, speciation or hybridization); (4) inferring demographic parameters such as Ne and demographic bottleneck; (5) resolve genetic relationships among individuals within and among populations and the ecological factors that determine them; (6) quantifying the effect of genetic diversity in shaping population dynamics; and (7) monitoring spatiotemporal changes in biodiversity across individuals, populations, species and communities. Here I provide an overview of the most relevant approaches applied in landscape genetics to advance our knowledge on the ecological and evolutionary processes that underlie the ecoevolutionary dynamics of natural populations in changing landscapes.