| Human land use affects how animals move across landscapes and how their populations are structured. Understanding whether landscape resistance or population characteristics have greater influence on spatial genetic patterns and the temporal speed with which they develop is important for wildlife management in an increasingly human-modified environment. Detecting how landscape change impacts spatial and temporal genetic patterns depends on the size and genetic diversity of a population, in addition to the degree that the landscape resists movement. To examine this, gene flow between populations will be simulated for a landscape with two habitat patches separated by an intervening matrix and a barrier for multiple generations. Landscape surfaces will be tested at a gradient of resistances from low to high for both the landscape matrix and the linear barrier. Populations will be simulated with different parameters, including effective population size (Ne), dispersal ability, and genetic diversity (number of loci and number of alleles per locus). We expect to find that the strength of spatial genetic patterns and the time for them to appear will be dependent on the size and diversity of the population and the degree of resistance of the landscape to movement.
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