Effective fishery management policy depends on accurate life‐history data, particularly for harvested species. Longevity is a core life‐history trait that is directly related to annual survival and lifetime reproductive potential, but fish longevity is generally not well documented, particularly for long‐lived species. We used capture–mark–recapture data spanning 44 years as an alternative method to estimate sex‐specific adult...

Artificial propagation and wild release may influence the genetic integrity of wild populations. This practice has been prevalent in fisheries for centuries and is often termed ‘stocking’. In the Laurentian Great Lakes (Great Lakes here‐on), walleye populations faced declines from the 1950s to the 1970s, prompting extensive stocking efforts for restoration. By the mid‐2010s, walleye populations showed signs of recovery, but th...

The relationships between habitat amount and fragmentation level and functional connectivity and inbreeding remain unclear. Thus, we used genetic algorithms to optimize the transformation of habitat area and fragmentation variables into resistance surfaces to predict genetic structure and examined habitat area and fragmentation effects on inbreeding through a moving window and spatial autoregressive modeling approach. We appli...

Introduced species often colonize regions that have vastly different ecological and environmental conditions than those found in their native range. As such, species introductions can provide a deeper understanding into the process of adaptive evolution. In the 1880s, steelhead trout ( Oncorhynchus mykiss ) from California were introduced into Lake Michigan (Laurentian Great Lakes, North America) where they established natural...

This study utilized molecular tools to quantify the prevalence of predation during the vulnerable drifting larval life‐history stage of lake sturgeon Acipenser fulvescens . How predators, the co‐distributed prey community and abiotic environmental conditions ( e.g ., stream substrata) affected predation levels was quantified. Nightly D‐frame drift net surveys were used to estimate the biomass of A. fulvescens and co‐distribute...

Nonrandom mating can structure populations and has important implications for population‐level processes. Investigating how and why mating deviates from random is important for understanding evolutionary processes as well as informing conservation and management. Prior to the implementation of parentage analyses, understanding mating patterns in solitary, elusive species like bears was virtually impossible. Here, we capitalize...

Quantifying interannual variation in effective adult breeding number ( N b ) and relationships between N b , effective population size ( N e ), adult census size ( N ) and population demographic characteristics are important to predict genetic changes in populations of conservation concern. Such relationships are rarely available for long‐lived iteroparous species like lake sturgeon ( Acipenser fulvescens ). We estimated annua...

Measures of genetic structure among individuals or populations collected at different spatial locations across a landscape are commonly used as surrogate measures of functional (i.e. demographic or genetic) connectivity. In order to understand how landscape characteristics influence functional connectivity, resistance surfaces are typically created in a raster GIS environment. These resistance surfaces represent hypothesized r...

Landscape features exist at multiple spatial and temporal scales, and these naturally affect spatial genetic structure and our ability to make inferences about gene flow. This article discusses how decisions about sampling of genotypes (including choices about analytical methods and genetic markers) should be driven by the scale of spatial genetic structure, the time frame that landscape features have existed in their current...

Understanding the genetic basis of species adaptation in the context of global change poses one of the greatest challenges of this century. Although we have begun to understand the molecular basis of adaptation in those species for which whole genome sequences are available, the molecular basis of adaptation is still poorly understood for most non‐model species. In this paper, we outline major challenges and future research di...

Population genetics theory is primarily based on mathematical models in which spatial complexity and temporal variability are largely ignored. In contrast, the field of landscape genetics expressly focuses on how population genetic processes are affected by complex spatial and temporal environmental heterogeneity. It is spatially explicit and relates patterns to processes by combining complex and realistic life histories, beha...