Dispersal is a highly variable trait influenced by life history and ecological factors, affecting gene flow when dispersers successfully reproduce. Anadromous salmonids, with their diverse migratory strategies and ecological traits, serve as an ideal model for studying dispersal evolution, showcasing significant inter‐ and intraspecific variation. Although environmental factors like temperature likely influence dispersal prope...

Introduction Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding of water is increasingly being used to monitor coastal biodiversity shifts. However, we have limited knowledge of whether samples collected during discreet temporal periods depict holistic ecosystem changes over longer time spans. Methods Here, we show how eDNA community structure varies across repeated sampling events at different temporal scales ranging from years to months...

Introduction Arctic marine ecosystems are changing rapidly, largely due to the observed accelerated warming that is associated with ongoing climate change. Environmental DNA (eDNA) combined with metabarcoding has great potential for large-scale biomonitoring of Arctic marine communities. However, important limitations remain, such as understanding the complexity and drivers of spatio-temporal variation in eDNA distribution. Me...

Hatcheries have long produced salmonids for fisheries and mitigation, though their widespread use is increasingly controversial because of potential impacts to wild salmonids. We conducted a global literature search of peer‐reviewed publications (1970–2021) evaluating how hatchery salmonids affected wild salmonids, developed a publicly available database, and synthesized results. Two hundred six publications met our search cri...

The Lake Sturgeon is a long‐lived, late‐maturing fish that declined significantly in abundance over the past 150 years. Since the 1990s, stocking has been used to recover numerous Lake Sturgeon populations across North America. Ill‐informed genetic mixing among populations can have unintended negative consequences, so a genotype‐by‐sequencing (GBS) study was undertaken to help guide the stocking strategy for Lake Sturgeon on t...

Nascent pairs of ecologically differentiated species offer an opportunity to get a better glimpse at the genetic architecture of speciation. Of particular interest is our recent ability to consider a wider range of genomic variants, not only single‐nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), thanks to long‐read sequencing technology. We can now identify structural variants (SVs) such as insertions, deletions and other rearrangements, all...

Knowledge of the larval ecology of winter‐spawning fish from the Estuary and Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada, remains scarce due to the seasonal ice cover that prevents ichthyoplankton sampling using conventional methods. Two winter‐spawning species, Atlantic halibut (AH , Hippoglossus hippoglossus ) and Greenland halibut (GH, Reinhardtius hippoglossoides ), support the most important groundfish fisheries of this area. In March 2...

Inferring the genomic basis of local adaptation is a long‐standing goal of evolutionary biology. Beyond its fundamental evolutionary implications, such knowledge can guide conservation decisions for populations of conservation and management concern. Here, we investigated the genomic basis of local adaptation in the Coho salmon ( Oncorhynchus kisutch ) across its entire North American range. We hypothesized that extensive spat...

Catch‐and‐release fishing is a common conservation practice in recreational fisheries for Atlantic Salmon, although the effects on the reproductive success of caught‐and‐released fish are poorly understood. Herein, we compared the relative reproductive success of caught‐and‐released to non‐caught salmon and tested the effect of temperature at release on reproductive success in the Rimouski River, Québec, Canada. At least 83% o...

In marine species experiencing intense fishing pressures, knowledge of genetic structure and local adaptation represent a critical information to assist sustainable management. In this study, we performed a landscape genomics analysis in the American lobster to investigate the issues pertaining to the consequences of making use of putative adaptive loci to reliably infer population structure and thus more rigorously delineatin...

A robust assessment of the American eel ( Anguilla rostrata ) stock, required to guide conservation efforts, is challenged by the species’ vast range, high variability in demographic parameters and data inadequacies. Novel ideas and underutilised resources that may assist both analytic assessments and spatially oriented modelling include (1) species and environmental databases; (2) mining of data from scattered sources; (3) in...

The role of methylation in adaptive, developmental and speciation processes has attracted considerable interest, but interpretation of results is complicated by diffuse boundaries between genetic and non‐genetic variation. We studied whole genome genetic and methylation variation in the European eel, distributed from subarctic to subtropical environments, but with panmixia precluding genetically based local adaptation beyond s...

The availability of genomic data for an increasing number of species makes it possible to incorporate evolutionary processes into conservation plans. Recent studies show how genetic data can inform spatial conservation prioritization (SCP), but they focus on metrics of diversity and distinctness derived primarily from neutral genetic data sets. Identifying adaptive genetic markers can provide important information regarding th...

Increasing evidence shows that structural variants represent an overlooked aspect of genetic variation with consequential evolutionary roles. Among those, copy number variants (CNVs), including duplicated genomic regions and transposable elements (TEs), may contribute to local adaptation and/or reproductive isolation among divergent populations. Those mechanisms suppose that CNVs could be used to infer neutral and/or adaptive...