Pleistocene environmental fluctuations had well-characterized impacts on the patterns of within-species divergences and diversity in temperate habitats. Here authors examined the impact the Pleistocene had on widely distributed forest vertebrates in a tropical system where the distribution of the habitat was affected by those fluctuations.

The global loss of biodiversity continues at an alarming rate. Genomic approaches have been suggested as a promising tool for conservation practice as scaling up to genome-wide data can improve traditional conservation genetic inferences and provide qualitatively novel insights. However, the generation of genomic data and subsequent analyses and interpretations remain challenging and largely confined to academic research in ecology and evolution.

Morphological and physiological diversity observed in domestic species is strikingly greater than that seen in wild species. To explain this diversity, a hypothesis was proposed some decades ago that suggested that selective forces imposed on domestic species (plants and animals) would have led to higher recombination rate in the genome of domesticates, thus allowing for new combinations of alleles, and thus also of characters. However, this hypothesis had never been conclusively tested....

In natural populations, mating between relatives can have important fitness consequences due to the negative effects of reduced heterozygosity.