The Department of Ecology at Montana State University is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Scholar as part of NSF-funded research on speciation under alternating cycles of gene flow and isolation (fundi...

Genomic mechanisms explaining why some hybrid zones remain stable while others collapse into hybrid swarms are poorly understood. In Montana's Kootenai River Basin, native interior redband trout (Onc...

Ancient DNA and new inference methods have transformed the study of human origins, but consensus has not followed. Evidence increasingly indicates that hominin populations were pervasively structured ...

Abstract. Standardbred horses are widely used for harness racing in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. In the United States, two gaits (Pac

Heredity - The effective size of the Scandinavian wolf population is too small for both short- and long-term conservation

Measuring inbreeding via runs of homozygosity (ROH) captures realized autozygosity and can infer inbreeding timing through ROH length. A growing body of literature links the proportion of the genome ....

Around 30 top staffers have been reshuffled, with some people moving to teams outside their areas of expertise.

The relative importance of genetic drift versus selection to evolutionary change has long been debated. This debate has mainly focused over long-time-scales (e.g. hundreds of thousands of generations)...

By analyzing genomes from 241 Florida scrub-jays across five populations and two time points, Nguyen et al. reveal substantial losses of genetic diversity and increased inbreeding following population...

As anthropogenic habitat fragmentation and population decline accelerate globally, growing numbers of species face compounding demographic and genetic threats to long-term survival. Many populations a...

It is poorly understood how populations survive extreme bottlenecks despite severe inbreeding. We investigate the genomic architecture of inbreeding in the once critically endangered Seychelles warble...

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Molecular Ecology is an international journal for research using molecular genetic techniques to address questions in ecology, evolution, behavior and conservation.

Photo credit: David Herasimtschuk

Researchers often use multiple genetic methods to estimate contemporary effective population size (Ne), but few formally combine estimates despite potential benefits for increasing precision. Maximis....

Colossal Biosciences’ CEO says its work follows a ‘moral obligation’ while critics say it’s ‘tech bro’ hype that could undermine conservation

With increasing habitat fragmentation and population isolation, inbreeding becomes a pressing concern for the persistence of wildlife populations. Detailed inbreeding monitoring is crucial for assess...

Republicans in Congress want to allow more mining and oil drilling on federal public lands, and they’ve recently turned to an obscure legislative maneuver to open areas for business.

Abstract. The snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) is considered a critical keystone species of the boreal and temperate forests of North America. Although the

The Southern Resident Killer Whales are a high-profile population listed as endangered in the United States and Canada. Risks to the population are well known, and include insufficient prey, inbreedi...

Now it’s our turn to shape what comes next. A new project. A mission years in the making.

Share your perspective on the state of nature in the U.S.

This course will be 6 days long, and the instructors are Fred Allendorf, Sally Aitken, and Marty Kardos. This course will be based on Conservation and Genomics of Populations (Allendorf et al. 2022). ...

Last year’s mass firings of “probationary” federal workers sent researchers’ lives into turmoil

Effective population size (Ne) is a key concept in biology and conservation. Stripped to its bare essentials, it reflects how much genetic drift a population experiences, expressed as a number of ind...