During the Late Pleistocene, major parts of North America were periodically covered by ice sheets. However, there are still questions about whether ice‐free refugia were present in the Alexander Archipelago along the Southeast (SE) Alaska coast during the last glacial maximum (LGM). Numerous subfossils have been recovered from caves in SE Alaska, including American black ( Ursus americanus ) and brown ( U. arctos ) bears, whic...

Episodes of Quaternary environmental change shaped the genomes of extant species, influencing their response to contemporary environments, which are changing rapidly. Island endemics are among the most vulnerable to such change, accounting for a disproportionate number of recent extinctions. To prevent extinctions and conserve island biodiversity it is vital to combine knowledge of species' ecologies with their complex evoluti...

Aim Connectivity is vital to the resiliency of populations to environmental change and stochastic events, especially for cold‐adapted species as Arctic and alpine tundra habitats retract as the climate warms. We examined the influence of past and current landscapes on genomic connectivity in cold‐adapted galliformes as a critical first step to assess the vulnerability of Alaska ptarmigan and grouse to environmental change. We...

Aim Numerous glacial refugia have been hypothesized along North America's North Pacific Coast that may have increased divergence of refugial taxa, leading to elevated endemism and subsequently clustered hybrid zones following deglaciation. The locations and community composition of these ice‐free areas remains controversial, but whole‐genome sequences now enable detailed analysis of the demographic and evolutionary histories o...

Environmental conditions in the Chukchi Sea are changing rapidly and may alter the abundance and distribution of marine species and their benthic prey. We used a metabarcoding approach to identify potentially important prey taxa from Pacific walrus ( Odobenus rosmarus divergens ) fecal samples ( n = 87). Bivalvia was the most dominant class of prey (66% of all normalized counts) and occurred in 98% of the samples. Polychaeta a...

Summary In A ugust 2008, K asatochi volcano erupted and buried a small island in pyroclastic deposits and fine ash; since then, microbes, plants and birds have begun to re‐colonize the initially sterile surface. Five years post‐eruption, bacterial 16S r RNA gene and fungal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) copy numbers and extracellular enzyme activity ( EEA ) potentials were one to two orders of magnitude greater in pyroclast...

Aim We examined data for ermine ( M ustela erminea ) to test two sets of diversification hypotheses concerning the number and location of late P leistocene refugia, the timing and mode of diversification, and the evolutionary influence of insularization. Location Temperate and sub‐ A rctic N orthern H emisphere. Methods We used up to two mitochondrial and four nuclear loci from 237 specimens for statistical phylogeographical a...

Aim Quaternary climate cycles played an important role in promoting diversification across the N orthern H emisphere, although details of the mechanisms driving evolutionary change are still poorly resolved. In a comparative phylogeographical framework, we investigate temporal, spatial and ecological components of evolution within a suite of H olarctic small mammals. We test a hypothesis of simultaneous divergence among multip...

Relatively little genetic variation has been uncovered in surveys across North American wolf populations. Pacific Northwest coastal wolves, in particular, have never been analysed. With an emphasis on coastal Alaska wolf populations, variation at 11 microsatellite loci was assessed. Coastal wolf populations were distinctive from continental wolves and high levels of diversity were found within this isolated and relatively smal...