Abstract
Habitat fragmentation is a pressing threat to wildlife populations, and maintenance of gene flow between populations is an essential goal of conservation. Resistance surfaces have emerged as an important tool for modelling connectivity and developing management strategies to mitigate effects of habitat fragmentation. However, recent studies have noted inconsistencies in the factors most strongly associated with connectivity across different landscapes. Thus, replication of genetic-based resistance surface optimisation across landscapes may be necessary for making robust conclusions about the influence of environmental variables. Accordingly, replication represents a substantive challenge and opportunity in the field of landscape genetics. In this study, we conducted replicated landscape genetic analyses across five landscapes in Tennessee and Kentucky for a threatened wetland amphibian, the four-toed salamander (Hemidactylium scutatum). We tested multiple hypotheses of how different landscape features that could directly affect small, desiccation-intolerant amphibians (e.g., canopy cover) influenced gene flow and assessed the appropriate scale at which to model different features. We found some concordance in the landscape features that influenced gene flow (e.g., a common importance of forest cover and topography), but also some differences—potentially owing to the difference in variability of predictors across landscapes. We also found discordance in the scale of effect of different features across landscapes. Our work emphasises that flat areas of moist forest not bisected by roads may be important for H. scutatum conservation, and our replicated design allows us to identify relationships that would have been missed if only using one study site.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e17808 |
| Journal | Molecular Ecology |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue number | 13 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2025 |
Funding
Funding: This study was supported by Orianne Society, Appalachian Highlands Science Learning Center and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We thank Jon Cox, Sarah Darling, Paul Davis, José Garrido, Lindsey Hayter, Asha Miller-Murthy, Jacob Skiles and Anna Wade for their assistance in the field. We also thank Jon Davenport, Kevin Hutcheson, John MacGregor and Paul Super for their help in identifying sampling sites. We especially thank Timothy Herman for the use of his samples. Lastly, we thank Christopher Cousins, Mona Papeş, Bill Peterman, Nick Van Gilder, and two anonymous reviewers for their useful input on this work. This work was approved by the Animal Care and Use Committee at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (protocol 0476), the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (protocol 3014-1123), the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (permits 2283 and 6070), the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources (permit SC2411038), the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (permit GRSM-02228) and Daniel Boone National Forest (permit CMB6169). This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science through the Oak Ridge Reservation Wildlife Management and Land Use Planning tasks, the Orianne Society, the Appalachian Highlands Science Learning Center, and B.S.W. was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This manuscript has been authored by UT‐Battelle LLC under Contract No. DE‐AC05‐00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a non‐exclusive, paid‐up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to the results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( http://energy.gov/downloads/doe‐public‐access‐plan ). We thank Jon Cox, Sarah Darling, Paul Davis, José Garrido, Lindsey Hayter, Asha Miller‐Murthy, Jacob Skiles and Anna Wade for their assistance in the field. We also thank Jon Davenport, Kevin Hutcheson, John MacGregor and Paul Super for their help in identifying sampling sites. We especially thank Timothy Herman for the use of his samples. Lastly, we thank Christopher Cousins, Mona Papeş, Bill Peterman, Nick Van Gilder, and two anonymous reviewers for their useful input on this work. This work was approved by the Animal Care and Use Committee at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (protocol 0476), the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (protocol 3014‐1123), the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (permits 2283 and 6070), the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources (permit SC2411038), the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (permit GRSM‐02228) and Daniel Boone National Forest (permit CMB6169). This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science through the Oak Ridge Reservation Wildlife Management and Land Use Planning tasks, the Orianne Society, the Appalachian Highlands Science Learning Center, and B.S.W. was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Keywords
- Hemidactylium scutatum
- conservation management
- landscape genetics
- replication
- resistance surface
- scale of effect