Tree species worldwide are under threat from non‐native pathogens that impact forests and the ecosystem services they provide. Myrtle rust, caused by Austropuccinia psidii , is one example, first detected in Australia in 2010. This fungal pathogen infects immature tissue from a wide range of Myrtaceae hosts, including the wetland foundation species Melaleuca quinquenervia . Durable restoration action for this species would pre...

Myrtle rust is a plant disease caused by the invasive fungal pathogen Austropuccinia psidii (G. Winter) Beenken, which has a global host list of 480 species. It was detected in Australia in 2010 and has caused the rapid decline of native Myrtaceae species, including rainforest trees Rhodamnia rubescens (Benth.) Miq. (scrub turpentine) and Rhodomyrtus psidioides (G.Don) Benth. (native guava). Ex situ collections of these specie...

Translocation is an important conservation tool for reducing the probability of extinction of threatened plants. It is also becoming an increasingly common management practice, as habitats are destroyed and climate change pushes more plants beyond the limits of their tolerances. Here we outline the case for informing translocations with dedicated genomic data. We begin by describing principles for using genomic and genetic app...

Aim Focussing on pairs of sister species across three genera of scincid lizards, we use genomic evidence to test for larger‐scale, late‐Pleistocene changes in distributions of lizards in the Australian arid zone (AZ) than in the adjacent monsoonal tropics (MT). Location Northern and central Australia. Taxon Scincidae: Squamata. Methods We sequenced ~2000 nuclear exons and one mitochondrial gene across the distributions of spec...

Detecting genetic variants under selection using F ST outlier analysis (OA) and environmental association analyses (EAAs) are popular approaches that provide insight into the genetic basis of local adaptation. Despite the frequent use of OA and EAA approaches and their increasing attractiveness for detecting signatures of selection, their application to field‐based empirical data have not been synthesized. Here, we review 66 e...

Spatial responses of species to past climate change depend on both intrinsic traits (climatic niche breadth, dispersal rates) and the scale of climatic fluctuations across the landscape. New capabilities in generating and analysing population genomic data, along with spatial modelling, have unleashed our capacity to infer how past climate changes have shaped populations, and by extension, complex communities. Combining these a...

Species endemic to the tropical regions are expected to be vulnerable to future climate change due in part to their relatively narrow climatic niches. In addition, these species are more likely to have responded strongly to past climatic change, and this can be explored through phylogeographic analyses. To test the hypothesis that tropical specialists are more sensitive to climate change than climate generalists, we generated...

Species delimitation has seen a paradigm shift as increasing accessibility of genomic‐scale data enables separation of lineages with convergent morphological traits and the merging of recently diverged ecotypes that have distinguishing characteristics. We inferred the process of lineage formation among Australian species in the widespread and highly variable genus Pelargonium by combining phylogenomic and population genomic an...

High‐throughput sequencing approaches offer opportunities to better understand the evolutionary processes driving diversification, particularly in nonmodel organisms. In particular, the 100–1000's of loci that can now be sequenced are providing unprecedented power in population, speciation and phylogenetic studies. Here, we apply an exon capture approach to generate >99% complete sequence and SNP data across >2000 loci from a...

Highly expressed proteins can exhibit relatively small material costs, in terms of the quantities of carbon (C), nitrogen (N) or sulphur (S) atoms they contain. This ‘elemental sparing’ probably reflects selection to reduce the quantities of potentially growth‐limiting elements in abundant proteins, but the evolutionary mechanisms for adaptive elemental sparing are still poorly understood. Here, we predict that the extent of ‘...