Oral Session - Modeling Species Patterns Chair(s): Bossenbroek, Jonathan¹, ¹ University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN
Friday, April 2, 2004 3:00 PM - 5:20 PM Apollo Room 5

Integrating Landscape Ecology and Population Genetics: New Tools for Circuit Theory. McRae, Brad^*,1, ¹ School of Forestry, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

ABSTRACT- I introduce a model of landscape connectivity designed to predict gene flow among plant and animal populations of conventional population genetic models which assume unbounded populations with homogeneous migration rates and population densities, ignoring variation in demographic parameters and edge effects. The model can be used to predict effective migration rates and genetic differentiation directly, or as a predictor of relative levels of connectivity between populations in heterogeneous landscapes without the need to model demographic parameters explicitly. Because the model integrates all possible routes of interpatch movement simultaneously, it may also improve over current methods used in conservation planning and in predicting impacts of landscape change on plant and animal populations. The model's robustness to choice of scale and its computational efficiency allow for straightforward integration with GIS platforms. I illustrate the model's use with previously published dataset of genetic differentiation in North American wolverines (Gulo gulo). For wolverines and for other species, the model performs much better than traditional models, that do not take into account the spatial distribution of habitat.

KEY WORDS: landscape connectivity, fragmentation, gene flow, disperal, population structure