The Molecular Ecologist: Reviewing the causes of population genetic structure

distance Photo by eliassss.

At The Molecular Ecologist today, I highlight a couple of recent literature reviews that seek to understand how natural populations are structured by the limitations of distance, and by local adaptation:

Taken together, these two papers are a nice compilation of a very large literature. If nothing else, they demonstrate that we’re well past the point of asking whether environmental isolation happens at all—in fact, it looks to be quite common—and we’re ready to start digging into the details of when and why it develops.

To see what broad patterns two different groups of authors were able to extract from their surveys of many population genetic studies, go read the whole thing.◼