Animal biodiversity in a changing world: Using landscape genetics to assess the impacts of environmental change on populations and species.

Landscape genetics is a rapidly developing field that amalgamates population genetics, landscape ecology, and spatial analytical techniques. The aim of landscape genetics is to identify environmental influences on gene flow and selection, and on resulting spatial patterns in neutral and adaptive genetic variation. The number of published landscape genetic studies is still growing exponentially, and landscape genetic approaches are increasingly used to address various questions in ecology, evolution, and conservation. The presentation will be a mixture of a mini-lecture and a scientific presentation, and provide an overview of basic concepts, methods, and applications in landscape genetics.

The first part of the presentation will define landscape genetics and introduce several underlying concepts.  In the second part, the three analytical steps of landscape genetics are illustrated using both simulated and empirical data sets. In the third part, various research applications from conservation, ecology and evolution are shown. In this part, I will especially highlight the potential of landscape genetics for understanding environmental influences on biodiversity at the genetic and species level. Specifically, I will present studies that have used landscape genetics to predict genetic variation under future environmental conditions and to elucidate eco-evolutionary dynamics. Coupled with genomic approaches, such eco-evolutionary forecasting has tremendous potential for predicting evolution of organisms in changing environments (e.g., local adaptation to climate change) and resulting biodiversity patterns. Finally, I will summarize remaining challenges in landscape genetics and identify future research needs to move towards landscape genomics.