Landscape Genetics

LANDSCAPE GENETICS: CONCEPTS, METHODS, APPLICATIONS LANDSCAPE GENETICS: CONCEPTS, METHODS, APPLICATIONS Edited by Niko Balkenhol, Samuel A. Cushman, Andrew T. Storfer, Lisette P. Waits Landscape genetics is an exciting and rapidly growing field, melding methods and theory from landscape ecology and population genetics to address some of the most challenging and urgent ecological and evolutionary topics of our time. Landscape genetic approaches now enable researchers to study in detail how environmental complexity in space and time affect gene flow, genetic drift, and local adaptation. However, learning about the concepts and methods underlying the field remains challenging due to the highly interdisciplinary nature of the field, which relies on topics that have traditionally been treated separately in classes and textbooks. In this edited volume, some of the leading experts in landscape genetics provide the first comprehensive introduction to underlying concepts, commonly used methods, and current and future applications of landscape genetics. Consistent with the interdisciplinary nature of the field, the book includes textbook-like chapters that synthesize fundamental concepts and methods underlying landscape genetics (Part 1), chapters on advanced topics that deserve a more in-depth treatment (Part 2), and chapters illustrating the use of concepts and methods in empirical applications (Part 3). Aimed at beginning landscape geneticists and experienced researchers alike, this book will be helpful for all scientists and practitioners interested in learning, teaching, and applying landscape genetics.

Despite the substantial interest in landscape genetics from the scientific community, learning about the concepts and methods underlying the field remains very challenging. The reason for this is the highly interdisciplinary nature of the field, which combines population genetics, landscape ecology, and spatial statistics. These fields have traditionally been treated separately in classes and textbooks, and very few scientists have received the interdisciplinary training necessary to efficiently teach or apply the diversity of techniques encompassed by landscape genetics. To address the current knowledge gap, this book provides the first in depth treatment of landscape genetics in a single volume. Specifically, this book delivers fundamental concepts and methods underlying the field, covering particularly important analytical methods in detail, and presenting empirical and theoretical applications of landscape genetics for a variety of environments and species. Consistent with the interdisciplinary nature of landscape genetics, the book combines an introductory, textbook like section with additional sections on advanced topics and applications that are more typical of edited volumes. The chapter topics and the expertise of the authors and the editorial team make the book a standard reference for anyone interested in landscape genetics. The book includes contributions from many of the leading researchers in landscape genetics. The group of scientists we have assembled has worked on several collaborative projects over the last years, including a large number of peer reviewed papers, several landscape genetics workshops at international conferences, and a distributed graduate seminar on landscape genetics. Based on the experiences gained during these collaborative teaching and research activities, the book includes chapters that synthesize fundamental concepts and methods underlying landscape genetics (Part 1), chapters on advanced topics that deserve a more in depth treatment (Part 2), and chapters illustrating the use of concepts and methods in empirical applications (Part 3). This structure ensures a high usefulness of the book for beginning landscape geneticists and experienced researchers alike, so that it has a broad target audience. At least one of the four co editors is involved in almost every chapter of the book, thereby ensuring a high consistency and coherency among chapters.

Ecosystems are the stage on which the play of evolution is acted, and ecosystems are complex, spatially structured and temporally varying. The purpose of this Research Topic is to explore critical challenges and opportunities for the transition from landscape genetics to landscape genomics. Landscape genetics has focused on the spatial analysis of small genetic datasets, typically comprised of less than 20 microsatellite markers, taken from clusters of individuals in putative populations or distributed individuals across landscapes. The recent emergence of large scale genomic datasets produced by next generation sequencing methods poses tremendous challenge and opportunity to the field. Perhaps the greatest is to produce, process, curate, archive and analyze spatially referenced genomic datasets in a way such that research is led by a priori hypotheses regarding how environmental heterogeneity and temporal dynamics interact to affect gene flow and selection. The papers in the Research Topic cover a broad range of topics under this area of focus, from reviews of the emergence of landscape genetics, to best practices in spatial analysis of genetic data. The compilation, like the emerging field itself, is eclectic and illustrates the scope of both the challenges and opportunities of this emerging field.

As Earth faces the greatest mass extinction in 65 million years, the present is a moment of tremendous foment and emergence in ecological science. With leaps in advances in ecological research and the technical tools available, scientists face the critical task of challenging policymakers and the public to recognize the urgency of our global crisis. This book focuses directly on the interplay between theory, data, and analytical methodology in the rapidly evolving fields of animal ecology, conservation, and management. The mixture of topics of particular current relevance includes landscape ecology, remote sensing, spatial modeling, geostatistics, genomics, and ecological informatics. The greatest interest to the practicing scientist and graduate student will be the synthesis and integration of these topics to provide a composite view of the emerging field of spatial ecological informatics and its applications in research and management.

Habitat loss and degradation that comes as a result of human activity is the single biggest threat to biodiversity in the world today. Habitat Fragmentation and Landscape Change is a groundbreaking work that brings together a wealth of information from a wide range of sources to define the ecological problems caused by landscape change and to highlight the relationships among landscape change, habitat fragmentation, and biodiversity conservation. The book: synthesizes a large body of information from the scientific literature considers key theoretical principles for examining and predicting effects examines the range of effects that can arise explores ways of mitigating impacts reviews approaches to studying the problem discusses knowledge gaps and future areas for research and management Habitat Fragmentation and Landscape Change offers a unique mix of theoretical and practical information, outlining general principles and approaches and illustrating those principles with case studies from around the world. It represents a definitive overview and synthesis on the full range of topics that fall under the widely used but often vaguely defined term "habitat fragmentation."

The 'Adaptive Landscape' has been a central concept in population genetics and evolutionary biology since this powerful metaphor was first formulated in 1932. This volume brings together historians of science, philosophers, ecologists, and evolutionary biologists, to discuss the state of the art from several different perspectives.

Human activity during the Anthropocene has transformed landscapes worldwide on a scale that rivals or exceeds even the largest of natural forces. Landscape ecology has emerged as a science to investigate the interactions between natural and anthropogenic landscapes and ecological processes across a wide range of scales and systems: from the effects of habitat or resource distributions on the individual movements, gene flow, and population dynamics of plants and animals; to the human alteration of landscapes affecting the structure of biological communities and the functioning of entire ecosystems; to the sustainable management of natural resources and the ecosystem goods and services upon which society depends. This novel and comprehensive text presents the principles, theory, methods, and applications of landscape ecology in an engaging and accessible format that is supplemented by numerous examples and case studies from a variety of systems, including freshwater and marine "scapes".