Abstract
The brown hare being an important game species which is widespread across the European continent has been in focus of many population genetic studies. However only a few comprising researches can be found on the diversity of Central-European populations.
 The aim of our large scale long term ongoing study is to fill this gap of information on the species by describing the genetic history and structure of the brown hare populations of the area using both mitochondrial DNA markers and genomic skin and hair colour regulating genes.
 This article gives forth a part of our results concerning the mitochondrial DNA diversity of Hungarian brown hares based on amplification of a 512 bp long D-loop sequence. N=39 tissue or hair samples have been collected from 15 sampling sites on the Hungarian Great Plain. We have described a high level of haplotype diversity (Hd=0.879±0.044) based on a 410 bp alignment of our sequences. We have found 17 haplotypes within our sample set with the nucleotid diversity of π=0.01167±0.0022. Our ongoing research shows high genetic diversity for the brown hare in the studied region and a second alignment with 156 sequences downloaded from GenBank indicates a geographic pattern of haplotypes among the studied populations though these results need confirmation by our further analyses.
Highlights
Among other effects the severe and multiple climatic changes in the Pleistocene epoch are the most important reasons why the diversity and distribution of most European mammal species show their contemporary characteristics
For instance Stamatis et al (2009) described one major refugium area on the Balkans while other researchers have presented works which suggest that multiple refugia were present in the Mediterranean Basin (Kasapidis et al 2005, Fickel et al 2008) including one on the Iberian-peninsula
Our analysis revealed h=17 mtDNA D-loop haplotypes among the N=39 Hungarian L. europaeus individuals of which 8 were unique (i. e. consisting of only one individual)
Summary
Among other effects the severe and multiple climatic changes in the Pleistocene epoch are the most important reasons why the diversity and distribution of most European mammal species show their contemporary characteristics. The L. europaeus is native and present on the majority of the European continent (Folitarek 1940, Thenius 1980) and is a highly important game species which make it an obvious subject for different population genetic studies. For instance Stamatis et al (2009) described one major refugium area on the Balkans while other researchers have presented works which suggest that multiple refugia were present in the Mediterranean Basin (Kasapidis et al 2005, Fickel et al 2008) including one on the Iberian-peninsula
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