Aim Coastal fishes have a fundamental role in marine ecosystem functioning and contributions to people, but face increasing threats due to climate change, habitat degradation and overexploitation. The extent to which human pressures are impacting coastal fish biodiversity in comparison with geographic and environmental factors at large spatial scale is still under scrutiny. Here, we took advantage of environmental DNA (eDNA) m...

A ring trial among five European laboratories was organized to reach consistency in microsatellite (MS) typing of the zoonotic parasite Toxoplasma gondii . Three sample sets were circulated and analyzed by each laboratory following a previously published method that is based on fragment length polymorphism of 15 MS markers. The first sample set compared typing results in general and focused on effects of DNA concentration; the...

Current population genetic models fail to cope with genetic differentiation for species with large, contiguous and heterogeneous distribution. We show that in such a case, genetic differentiation can be predicted at equilibrium by circuit theory, where conductance corresponds to abundance in species distribution models ( SDM s). Circuit‐ SDM approach was used for the phylogeographic study of the lepidopteran cereal stemborer B...

The use of sequence polymorphism from individual mitochondrial genes to infer past demography has recently proved controversial because of the recurrence of selective sweeps acting over genes and the need for unlinked multilocus data sets. However, comparative analyses using several species for one gene and/or multiple genes for one species can serve as a test for potential selective effects and clarify our understanding of hi...

The population genetics and phylogeography of African phytophagous insects have received little attention. Some, such as the maize stalk borer Busseola fusca , display significant geographic differences in ecological preferences that may be congruent with patterns of molecular variation. To test this, we collected 307 individuals of this species from maize and cultivated sorghum at 52 localities in West, Central and East Afric...

This study provides the first phylogenetic analysis of a large sample of the two largest genera of seed‐beetles, Acanthoscelides Schilsky and Bruchidius Schilsky, which mostly feed on legumes (Fabaceae). The goal of this study was to investigate evolutionary patterns in relation to biogeography and host‐plant associations. We used three mitochondrial molecular markers and parsimony and Bayesian inference methods to reconstruct...