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Implications of recurrent disturbance for genetic diversity.

ABSTRACT: Exploring interactions between ecological disturbance, species' abundances and community composition provides critical insights for ecological dynamics. While disturbance is also potentially an important driver of landscape genetic patterns, the mechanisms by which these patterns may arise by selective and neutral processes are not well-understood. We used simulation to evaluate the relative importance of disturbance regime components, and their interaction with demographic and dispersal processes, on the distribution of genetic diversity across landscapes. We investigated genetic impacts of variation in key components of disturbance regimes and spatial patterns that are likely to respond to climate change and land management, including disturbance size, frequency, and severity. The influence of disturbance was mediated by dispersal distance and, to a limited extent, by birth rate. Nevertheless, all three disturbance regime components strongly influenced spatial and temporal patterns of genetic diversity within subpopulations, and were associated with changes in genetic structure. Furthermore, disturbance-induced changes in temporal population dynamics and the spatial distribution of populations across the landscape resulted in disrupted isolation by distance patterns among populations. Our results show that forecast changes in disturbance regimes have the potential to cause major changes to the distribution of genetic diversity within and among populations. We highlight likely scenarios under which future changes to disturbance size, severity, or frequency will have the strongest impacts on population genetic patterns. In addition, our results have implications for the inference of biological processes from genetic data, because the effects of dispersal on genetic patterns were strongly mediated by disturbance regimes.

SUBMITTER: Davies ID

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4725449 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Socioeconomic and climatic factors are modifying fire regimes with an increase of fire frequency and extension. Unfortunately, the effects of recurrent fires on biological processes that ultimately affect the genetic diversity of animal populations are mostly unknown. We examined genetic patterns of diversity in the wall lizard Podarcis guadarramae in northern Portugal, one of the European regions with the highest percentage of burnt land. This species is a small saxicolous lizard as it inhabits natural outcrops and artificial stone walls, likely in recurrent-fire landscapes. We genotyped nine microsatellites from ten populations selected according to a gradient in fire recurrence, and compared genetic diversity indexes and demographic patterns among them. At the population level, we hypothesize that a high level of mortality and population bottlenecks are expected to reduce genetic heterozygosity in sampled localities affected by recurrent fires. Alternatively, genetic signatures are expected to be absent whether fire did not cause high mortality. Regardless of levels of mortality, we expect a gain in genetic diversity whether recurrent fires facilitate lizard dispersal and migration due to the increased quality of the habitat for wall lizards. At the regional level, we examine whether a recurrent fire regime may disrupt the spatial structure of populations. Our results showed an increase in genetic diversity in recurrently burnt populations, and a decline in longer-unburnt populations. We did not detect bottleneck effects in repeatedly-burnt populations. High genetic diversity in recurrent fire populations suggests a high dispersion rate between adjacent metapopulations and perhaps immigration from outside the fire boundary. At the regional level, lizard populations show low differentiation and weak genetic structure, suggesting no effects of fire. This study confirms field-based censuses showing that recurrent-fire regimes give ecological opportunities to wall lizards that benefit from habitat openness.

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Implications of recurrent disturbance for genetic diversity.

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