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Introduction
Additional affiliations
July 2017 - July 2017
August 2015 - present
August 2004 - July 2010
Education
June 1998 - June 2002
August 1996 - June 1998
June 1994 - June 1996
Publications
Publications (126)
As human‐induced change eliminates natural habitats, it impacts genetic diversity and population connectivity for local biodiversity. The South African Cape Floristic Region (CFR) is the most diverse extratropical area for plant biodiversity, and much of its habitat is protected as a UNESCO World Heritage site. There has long been great interest in...
The European gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar L.) was first introduced to Massachusetts in 1869 and within 150 years has spread throughout eastern North America. This large‐scale invasion across a heterogeneous landscape allows examination of the genetic signatures of adaptation potentially associated with rapid geographic spread. We tested the hypothe...
Understanding migratory connectivity is essential for determining the drivers behind population dynamics and for implementing effective conservation strategies for migratory species. Genetic markers provide a means to describe migratory connectivity, however they can be uninformative for species with weak population genetic structure, which has lim...
As urbanization drastically alters the natural landscape and generates novel habitats within cities, the potential for changes to gene flow for urban-dwelling species increases. The western black widow spider (Latrodectus hesperus) is a medically relevant urban adapter pest species, for which we have previously identified population genetic signatu...
Urban fragmentation can reduce gene flow that isolates populations, reduces genetic diversity and increases population differentiation, all of which have negative conservation implications. Alternatively, gene flow may actually be increased among urban areas consistent with an urban facilitation model. In fact, urban adapter pests are able to thriv...
The recognition that communal roosts are important elements within the life cycle of bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) led to their protection under the “disturb” clause of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. The regular roost‐switching movements of bald eagles imply that roosts are part of an interactive network where roosts represent n...
Sex-specific genetic structure is a commonly observed pattern among vertebrate species. Facing differential selective pressures, individuals may adopt sex-specific life history traits that ultimately shape genetic variation among populations. Although differential dispersal dynamics are commonly detected in the literature, few studies have used gen...
Conspecific brood parasitism (CBP), although prevalent in some avian taxa, is easily overlooked when it occurs in low frequencies, and therefore the ecology of this behavior has only occasionally been described in passerines. We describe the occurrence of CBP in a population of Prothonotary Warblers (Protonotaria citrea) breeding in nest boxes, dem...
At the heart of the analyses of landscape genetics are isolation models seeking to explain either interindividual or interpopulation connectivity. These models use spatial, ecological, and topographic predictor variables measured between sites in an attempt to explain observed genetic variation. During the past decade, these models have adopted an...
This chapter examines landscape genetic studies in plant population genetics. The main focus here is on the discussion of approaches and examples showing how population genetic structure can be influenced by spatial and ecologically heterogeneity. The chapter presents case studies directed towards the biological inferences regarding population gene...
Landscape genetic data are by nature graph-like in structure; graph approaches are extremely powerful for a wide range of landscape genetic applications. Graph applications have great potential to address landscape genetics questions in evolution, ecology, and conservation. This chapter discusses three applications of graph approaches: using graph...
Mountains as natural barriers often have important effects on intraspecific genetic structure through restraining gene flow and enhancing differentiation among populations. While the Qinling and Daba mountains are considered significant geographic barriers, dividing China into temperate and subtropical regions, little is known about how this barrie...
Reticulitermes termites play key roles in dead wood decomposition and nutrient cycling in forests. They also damage man-made structures, resulting in considerable economic loss. In the eastern United States, five species (R. flavipes, R. virginicus, R. nelsonae, R. hageni and R. malletei) have overlapping ranges and are difficult to distinguish mor...
For a scientific discipline to be interdisciplinary it must satisfy two conditions; it must consist of contributions from at least two existing disciplines and it must be able to provide insights, through this interaction, that neither progenitor discipline could address. In this paper, I examine the complete body of peer-reviewed literature self-i...
Background / Purpose:
This poster summarizes the current work developing eDNA tools for Atlantic Sturgeon management.
Main conclusion:
So far, 93% and 83% of positive control samples between tanks containing Atlantic Sturgeon samples and Atlantic Sturgeon DNA spiked environmental samples have returned correct identifications of Atlantic Sturge...
Pollen-mediated gene flow is a major driver of spatial genetic structure in plant populations. Both individual plant characteristics and site-specific features of the landscape can modify the perceived attractiveness of plants to their pollinators and thus play an important role in shaping spatial genetic variation. Most studies of landscape-level...
The Forest ecosystem genomics Research: supporTing Transatlantic Cooperation project (FoResTTraC, http://www.foresttrac.eu/) sponsored a workshop in August 2010 to evaluate the potential for using a landscape genomics approach for studying plant adaptation to the environment and the potential of local populations for coping with changing climate. T...
Ecologically interacting species may have phylogeographical histories that are shaped both by features of their abiotic landscape and by biotic constraints imposed by their coassociation. The Baja California peninsula provides an excellent opportunity to examine the influence of abiotic vs. biotic factors on patterns of diversity in plant-insect sp...
Whether they are used to describe fitness, genome architecture or the spatial distribution of environmental variables, the concept of a landscape has figured prominently in our collective reasoning. The tradition of landscapes in evolutionary biology is one of fitness mapped onto axes defined by phenotypes or molecular sequence states. The characte...
The manner by which pollinators move across a landscape and their resulting preferences and/or avoidances of travel through particular habitat types can have a significant impact on plant population genetic structure and population-level connectivity. We examined the spatial genetic structure of the understory tree Cornus florida (Cornaceae) adults...
Patterns of spatial genetic structure produced following the expansion of an invasive species into novel habitats reflect
demographic processes that have shaped the genetic structure we see today. We examined 359 individuals from 23 populations
over 370km within the James River Basin of Virginia, USA as well as four populations outside of the basin...
Habitat fragmentation and landscape topology may influence the genetic structure and connectivity between natural populations.
Six microsatellite loci were used to infer the population structure of 35 populations (N = 788) of the alpine Arabian burnet moth Reissita simonyi (Lepidoptera, Zygaenidae) in Yemen and Oman. Due to the patchy distribution...
Landscape genetics is a burgeoning field of interest that focuses on how site-specific factors influence the distribution of genetic variation and the genetic connectivity of individuals and populations. In this manuscript, we focus on two methodological extensions for landscape genetic analyses: the use of conditional genetic distance (cGD) derive...
A widely-used approach for screening nuclear DNA markers is to obtain sequence data and use bioinformatic algorithms to estimate which two alleles are present in heterozygous individuals. It is common practice to omit unresolved genotypes from downstream analyses, but the implications of this have not been investigated. We evaluated the haplotype r...
Supplementary references. List of 60 papers from 18 journals included in the literature survey of empirical studies that used PHASE for haplotype reconstruction (see Table 1 of the main text).
Relationship between alternative measures of dataset polymorphism (x-axis) and the number of unresolved genotypes (y-axis). Simulated and empirical datasets are represented by solid circles and open circles, respectively. A-B, number of segregating sites (S) under the 0.90 and 0.60 thresholds; C-D, number of different alleles (AN) under the 0.90 an...
Increase over time in the use of PHASE in empirical studies relating to phylogeography, speciation or hybridization. Figure is based on the 60 articles included in our literature survey (see Table 1 in the main text). All of these studies focus on non-primate animals and used PHASE to reconstruct haplotypes from directly sequenced non-coding nuclea...
Frequency distribution of the relationship between number of segregating sites (S) and number of different alleles (AN) in the 500 simulated datasets from which 35 (solid circles) were arbitrarily selected for further analysis using PHASE. Figure shows that none of the 35 datasets are atypical (i.e., outliers), and so the results presented in the m...
Correlation coefficients between the four measures of dataset polymorphism. In this figure, values were calculated from the pooled empirical datasets (above diagonal), and pooled simulated datasets (below diagonal). S, number of segregating sites; AN, number of different alleles; GN, number of different genotypes; HO, observed heterozygosity.
Despite constant progress, cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the United States. The ability of tumors to metastasize is central to this dilemma, as many studies demonstrate successful treatment correlating to diagnosis prior to cancer spread. Hence a better understanding of cancer invasiveness and metastasis could provide critical...
We report eight new co-dominant nuclear markers for population genetics of the bark beetle Araptus attenuatus Wood. Several loci include introns from low-copy genes, and four cross-amplify in one or more related genera. The markers
show moderate levels of polymorphism (2–19 alleles per locus), and no loci showed significant deviations from Hardy–We...
To examine the generality of population-level impacts of ancient vicariance identified for numerous arid-adapted animal taxa along the Baja peninsula, we tested phylogeographical hypotheses in a similarly distributed desert plant, Euphorbia lomelii (Euphorbiaceae). In light of fossil data indicating marked changes in the distributions of Baja flori...