Chagas’ disease, the most widespread parasitic ailment in Latin America, produces clinical pictures with regional variations (1). In Chile, due to the country’s geographic and ecologic isolation, specific local conditions influencing Chagas’ disease vectors differ from those prevailing in other countries. One such vector, Triatoma spinohi, has not been found in other geographic areas. Among oth...

The oriental fruit moth Grapholita molesta is one of the major pests of stone and pome fruit species in Brazil. Here, we applied 1226 SNPs obtained by genotyping-by-sequencing to test whether host species associations or other factors such as geographic distance structured populations of this pest. Populations from the main areas of occurrence of G. molesta were sampled principally from peach a...

Boreal mammals in the Great Basin have long been viewed as island-bound Pleistocene relicts because they occupy island-like patches of montane habitat separated by desert lowlands that presumably are impermeable to dispersal. Recent work, however, raised the possibility that dispersal among mountain ranges is an important process in the biogeography of boreal mammals in the Great Basin. We test...

We used 276 cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI, 645 bp) and a subset of 84 16S large ribosomal subunit (16S, 451 bp) sequences to evaluate geographic patterns of genetic variation in 24 populations of the endemic Hawaiian land snail Succinea caduca spanning its range on six islands. Haplotype networks, gene tree topologies, pairwise molecular divergence and F(ST) matrices suggest substantial g...

South Florida slash pines provide an important microhabitat for some native Florida species, however, less than 1% of the original slash pine forest remains due to deforestation and hurricanes (DERM, 1995). This population decline makes it essential to study the genetic diversity of the remaining pine forest. Therefore, in this study we tested the hypothesis that geographic isolation has led to...

Studies of hybrid zone dynamics often investigate a single sampling period and draw conclusions from that temporal snapshot. Stochasticity can, however, result in loci with spurious outlier patterns, which is exacerbated by limited temporal or geographic sampling. Comparing admixed populations from different geographic regions is one way to detect repeatedly divergent genomic regions potentiall...

Three previous studies at Chernobyl, Ukraine, documented elevated mitochondrial DNA diversity in bank voles (Clethrionomys glareolus) from radioactively contaminated sites. Little evidence was found to link patterns of diversity in contaminated areas to radiation exposure, but the experimental design precluded discriminating among alternative explanations for elevated diversity in exposed group...

Xanthorrhoea johnsonii is a long lived slow growing perennial understorey species, that produces a large quantity of passively dispersed seed every 3 5 years. Reproductive maturity is not reached until 20 30 years of age. The temporal asynchrony of the flowering event in this population was analogous to geographic isolation through fragmentation. A small population of plants flowering in isolat...

Geographically isolated places are often sites of exported environmental risks, intense resource extraction, exploitation and marginalization, social policy neglect. These conditions create unique challenges related to vulnerability adaptation that have direct disaster management implications. Our research investigates the relationship between geographic isolation flood-related across Peru’s ec...