Landscape genetics

LASIG’s research activities in landscape genetics

Landscape genetics can be described as a combination of landscape ecology and population genetics. It is a young scientific field that focuses on testing the influences of environmental complexity on gene flow, spatial genetic variation, and local adaptation in plant and animal species. Landscape genetics facilitates the understanding of how geographical and environmental features structure genetic variation at both the population and the individual levels. Research in this field has important potential to inform various scientific disciplines like conservation biology and evolutionary ecology. The number of landscape genetic studies is growing rapidly, and landscape genetic approaches are increasingly used in practical conservation and management.

The landscape genetics’ group at LASIG is specialized in the contribution of Geographic Information Science for the conservation of plant and animal genetic resources. We apply spatial analysis, spatial statistics, spatial modelling, and geocomputation methods to conservation and landscape genetics, with core research activities landscape and seascape genomics, a field that aims to study and discover the genetic basis of adaptation by processing many simultaneous DNA-environment association models.