TY - JOUR AU - Westram, Anja M AU - Stankowski, Sean AU - Surendranadh, Parvathy AU - Barton, Nicholas H ID - 12265 IS - 9 JF - Journal of Evolutionary Biology KW - Ecology KW - Evolution KW - Behavior and Systematics SN - 1010-061X TI - Reproductive isolation, speciation, and the value of disagreement: A reply to the commentaries on ‘What is reproductive isolation?’ VL - 35 ER - TY - JOUR AB - A species distributed across diverse environments may adapt to local conditions. We ask how quickly such a species changes its range in response to changed conditions. Szép et al. (Szép E, Sachdeva H, Barton NH. 2021 Polygenic local adaptation in metapopulations: a stochastic eco-evolutionary model. Evolution75, 1030–1045 (doi:10.1111/evo.14210)) used the infinite island model to find the stationary distribution of allele frequencies and deme sizes. We extend this to find how a metapopulation responds to changes in carrying capacity, selection strength, or migration rate when deme sizes are fixed. We further develop a ‘fixed-state’ approximation. Under this approximation, polymorphism is only possible for a narrow range of habitat proportions when selection is weak compared to drift, but for a much wider range otherwise. When rates of selection or migration relative to drift change in a single deme of the metapopulation, the population takes a time of order m−1 to reach the new equilibrium. However, even with many loci, there can be substantial fluctuations in net adaptation, because at each locus, alleles randomly get lost or fixed. Thus, in a finite metapopulation, variation may gradually be lost by chance, even if it would persist in an infinite metapopulation. When conditions change across the whole metapopulation, there can be rapid change, which is predicted well by the fixed-state approximation. This work helps towards an understanding of how metapopulations extend their range across diverse environments. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Species’ ranges in the face of changing environments (Part II)’. AU - Barton, Nicholas H AU - Olusanya, Oluwafunmilola O ID - 10787 IS - 1848 JF - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences KW - General Agricultural and Biological Sciences KW - General Biochemistry KW - Genetics and Molecular Biology SN - 0962-8436 TI - The response of a metapopulation to a changing environment VL - 377 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We analyse how migration from a large mainland influences genetic load and population numbers on an island, in a scenario where fitness-affecting variants are unconditionally deleterious, and where numbers decline with increasing load. Our analysis shows that migration can have qualitatively different effects, depending on the total mutation target and fitness effects of deleterious variants. In particular, we find that populations exhibit a genetic Allee effect across a wide range of parameter combinations, when variants are partially recessive, cycling between low-load (large-population) and high-load (sink) states. Increased migration reduces load in the sink state (by increasing heterozygosity) but further inflates load in the large-population state (by hindering purging). We identify various critical parameter thresholds at which one or other stable state collapses, and discuss how these thresholds are influenced by the genetic versus demographic effects of migration. Our analysis is based on a ‘semi-deterministic’ analysis, which accounts for genetic drift but neglects demographic stochasticity. We also compare against simulations which account for both demographic stochasticity and drift. Our results clarify the importance of gene flow as a key determinant of extinction risk in peripheral populations, even in the absence of ecological gradients. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Species’ ranges in the face of changing environments (part I)’. AU - Sachdeva, Himani AU - Olusanya, Oluwafunmilola O AU - Barton, Nicholas H ID - 10658 IS - 1846 JF - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B SN - 0962-8436 TI - Genetic load and extinction in peripheral populations: The roles of migration, drift and demographic stochasticity VL - 377 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Many studies have quantified the distribution of heterozygosity and relatedness in natural populations, but few have examined the demographic processes driving these patterns. In this study, we take a novel approach by studying how population structure affects both pairwise identity and the distribution of heterozygosity in a natural population of the self-incompatible plant Antirrhinum majus. Excess variance in heterozygosity between individuals is due to identity disequilibrium, which reflects the variance in inbreeding between individuals; it is measured by the statistic g2. We calculated g2 together with FST and pairwise relatedness (Fij) using 91 SNPs in 22,353 individuals collected over 11 years. We find that pairwise Fij declines rapidly over short spatial scales, and the excess variance in heterozygosity between individuals reflects significant variation in inbreeding. Additionally, we detect an excess of individuals with around half the average heterozygosity, indicating either selfing or matings between close relatives. We use 2 types of simulation to ask whether variation in heterozygosity is consistent with fine-scale spatial population structure. First, by simulating offspring using parents drawn from a range of spatial scales, we show that the known pollen dispersal kernel explains g2. Second, we simulate a 1,000-generation pedigree using the known dispersal and spatial distribution and find that the resulting g2 is consistent with that observed from the field data. In contrast, a simulated population with uniform density underestimates g2, indicating that heterogeneous density promotes identity disequilibrium. Our study shows that heterogeneous density and leptokurtic dispersal can together explain the distribution of heterozygosity. AU - Surendranadh, Parvathy AU - Arathoon, Louise S AU - Baskett, Carina AU - Field, David AU - Pickup, Melinda AU - Barton, Nicholas H ID - 11411 IS - 3 JF - Genetics TI - Effects of fine-scale population structure on the distribution of heterozygosity in a long-term study of Antirrhinum majus VL - 221 ER - TY - DATA AB - Here are the research data underlying the publication "Effects of fine-scale population structure on the distribution of heterozygosity in a long-term study of Antirrhinum majus" Further information are summed up in the README document. AU - Surendranadh, Parvathy AU - Arathoon, Louise S AU - Baskett, Carina AU - Field, David AU - Pickup, Melinda AU - Barton, Nicholas H ID - 11321 TI - Effects of fine-scale population structure on the distribution of heterozygosity in a long-term study of Antirrhinum majus ER -