Snowshoe hares are distributed throughout the boreal forests of North America and play a key role in the functioning of these ecosystems. Very little is known about the social and genetic structure of snowshoe hare populations. In this thesis, I used seven microsatellite DNA markers to investigate three levels of hare population structure: mating structure, social structure and geographic structure. I sampled 382 hares at 12 sites in southwestern Yukon (separated by 3-140 km) from April to August 1999, during a peak phase of the 10-year hare cycle. I also obtained samples from interior Alaska (n=27) and western Montana (n=19) for comparison. Genetic diversity was high, with 5 to 37 alleles per locus (mean=13.4) and an overall expected [...]
