Wild snapdragon plant pedigree sheds light on limited connectivity enhanced by higher migrant reproductive success in a fragmented landscape.

In contrast with historical knowledge, a recent view posits that a non-negligible proportion of populations thrive in a fragmented landscape. One underlying mechanism is the maintenance of functional connectivity, i.e.

Quantifying heritability and estimating evolutionary potential in the wild when individuals that share genes also share environments.

Accurate heritability estimates for fitness-related traits are required to predict an organism's ability to respond to global change. Heritability estimates are theoretically expected to be inflated if, due to limited dispersal, individuals that share genes are also likely to share similar environments. However, if relatives occupy similar environments due, at least partly, to genetic variation for habitat selection, then accounting for environmental similarity in quantitative genetic models may result in diminished heritability estimates in wild populations.

Pedigree-free quantitative genetic approach provides evidence for heritability of movement tactics in wild roe deer.

Assessing the evolutionary potential of animal populations in the wild is crucial to understanding how they may respond to selection mediated by rapid environmental change (e.g. habitat loss and fragmentation).

RAD-sequencing for estimating genomic relatedness matrix-based heritability in the wild: A case study in roe deer.

Estimating the evolutionary potential of quantitative traits and reliably predicting responses to selection in wild populations are important challenges in evolutionary biology. The genomic revolution has opened up opportunities for measuring relatedness among individuals with precision, enabling pedigree-free estimation of trait heritabilities in wild populations. However, until now, most quantitative genetic studies based on a genomic relatedness matrix (GRM) have focused on long-term monitored populations for which traditional pedigrees were also available, and have often had access to knowledge of genome sequence and variability.