Current efforts to halt the decline of biodiversity are based primarily on protecting species richness. This narrow focus overlooks key components of biological diversity, particularly the infra-species genetic diversity, which is critical to consider with respect to genetic adaptation in changing environments. While comparative population genetics is recognized as a relevant approach to improve biodiversity management, it is...

Recent agricultural intensification threatens global biodiversity with amphibians being one of the most impacted groups. Because of their biphasic life cycle, amphibians are particularly vulnerable to habitat loss and fragmentation that often result in small, isolated populations and loss of genetic diversity. Here, we studied how landscape heterogeneity affects genetic diversity, gene flow and demographic parameters in the ma...

Sea otters, Enhydra lutris , were once abundant along the nearshore areas of the North Pacific. The international maritime fur trade that ended in 1911 left 13 small remnant populations with low genetic diversity. Subsequent translocations into previously occupied habitat resulted in several reintroduced populations along the coast of North America. We sampled sea otters between 2008 and 2011 throughout much of their current r...

Aim Understanding how historical and contemporary processes shaped and maintain spatial patterns of genetic diversity is a major goal for conservation biologists. Here, we characterized the pattern of neutral genetic diversity and we inferred underlying processes in the habitat‐forming octocoral Paramuricea clavata in the Adriatic Sea, a peculiar phylogeographic region of the Mediterranean Sea. Location Eastern coast of the Ad...

Dispersal may be strongly influenced by landscape and habitat characteristics that could either enhance or restrict movements of organisms. Therefore, spatial heterogeneity in landscape structure could influence gene flow and the spatial structure of populations. In the past decades, agricultural intensification has led to the reduction in grassland surfaces, their fragmentation and intensification. As these changes are not ho...

For free‐swimming marine species like sharks, only population genetics and demographic history analyses can be used to assess population health/status as baseline population numbers are usually unknown. We investigated the population genetics of blacktip reef sharks, C archarhinus melanopterus ; one of the most abundant reef‐associated sharks and the apex predator of many shallow water reefs of the I ndian and P acific O ceans...

This study presents genetic evidence that whale sharks, Rhincodon typus , are comprised of at least two populations that rarely mix and is the first to document a population expansion. Relatively high genetic structure is found when comparing sharks from the Gulf of Mexico with sharks from the Indo‐Pacific. If mixing occurs between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, it is not sufficient to counter genetic drift. This suggests wha...

Isolation by distance (IBD) models are widely used to predict levels of genetic connectivity as a function of Euclidean distance, and although recent studies have used GIS‐landscape ecological approaches to improve the predictability of spatial genetic structure, few if any have addressed the effect of habitat continuity on gene flow. Landscape effects on genetic connectivity are even less understood in marine populations, whe...

Fragmentation and loss of natural habitats are recognized as major threats to contemporary flora and fauna. Detecting past or current reductions in population size is therefore a major aim in conservation genetics. Statistical methods developed to this purpose have tended to ignore the effects of spatial population structure. However in many species, individual dispersal is restricted in space and fine‐scale spatial structure...

The cane toad ( Bufo marinus ) was introduced in 1935 in Australia, where it spread rapidly. We have tested for isolation by distance by analysing at a local geographical scale a continuous population using seven microsatellite markers and an individual‐based method. The matrix of pairwise individual differentiation was not significantly correlated with that of geographical distance. Regression analyses gave a low positive slo...