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Habitat fragmentation and degradation impacts an organism's ability to navigate the landscape, ultimately resulting in decreased gene flow and increased extinction risk. Understanding how landscape composition impacts gene flow (i.e., connectivity) and interacts with scale is essential to conservation decision-making. We used a landscape genetics approach implementing a recently developed statistical model based on the generalized Wishart probability distribution to identify the primary landscape features affecting gene flow and estimate the degree to which each component influences connectivity for Gunnison sage-grouse (Centrocercus minimus). We were interested in two spatial scales: among distinct populations...
Tags: Centrocercus minimus,
Colorado,
Ecology,
Gunnison sage-grouse,
USGS Science Data Catalog (SDC), All tags...
United States,
Utah,
Wildlife Biology,
adaptive management,
biota,
conservation genetics,
gene flow,
genetic connectivity,
landscape genetics,
western United States, Fewer tags
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Climate change affects populations over broad geographic ranges due to spatially autocorrelated abiotic conditions known as the Moran effect. However, populations do not always respond to broad-scale environmental changes synchronously across a landscape. We combined multiple datasets for a retrospective analysis of time-series count data (5–28 annual samples per segment) at 144 stream segments dispersed over nearly 1,000 linear kilometers of range to characterize the population structure and scale of spatial synchrony across the southern native range of a coldwater stream fish (brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis), which is sensitive to stream temperature and flow variations. Spatial synchrony differed by life stage...
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