Primate landscape genetics: A review and practical guide.

Abstract

Landscape genetics is an emerging field that integrates population genetics, landscape ecology, and spatial statistics to investigate how geographical and environmental features and evolutionary processes such as gene flow, genetic drift, and selection structure genetic variation at both the population and individual levels, with implications for ecology, evolution, and conservation biology. Despite being particularly well suited for primatologists, this method is currently underutilized. Here, we synthesize the current state of research on landscape genetics in primates. We begin by outlining how landscape genetics has been used to disentangle the drivers of diversity, followed by a review of how landscape genetic methods have been applied to primates. This is followed by a section highlighting special considerations when applying the methods to primates, and a practical guide to facilitate further landscape genetics studies using both existing and de novo datasets. We conclude by exploring future avenues of inquiry that could be facilitated by recent developments as well as underdeveloped applications of landscape genetics to primates.