Climate-change refugia: biodiversity in the slow lane.

Climate-change adaptation focuses on conducting and translating research to minimize the dire impacts of anthropogenic climate change, including threats to biodiversity and human welfare. One adaptation strategy is to focus conservation on climate-change refugia (that is, areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change over time that enable persistence of valued physical, ecological, and sociocultural resources). In this Special Issue, recent methodological and conceptual advances in refugia science will be highlighted.

Using Landscape Genetics Simulations for Planting Blister Rust Resistant Whitebark Pine in the US Northern Rocky Mountains.

Recent population declines to the high elevation western North America foundation species whitebark pine, have been driven by the synergistic effects of the invasive blister rust pathogen, mountain pine beetle (MPB), fire exclusion, and climate change. This has led to consideration for listing whitebark pine (WBP) as a threatened or endangered species under the Endangered Species Act, which has intensified interest in developing management strategies for maintaining and restoring the species. An important, but poorly studied, aspect of WBP restoration is the spatial variation in adaptive genetic variation and the potential of blister rust resistant strains to maintain viable populations in the future.

Pinus ponderosa: A checkered past obscured four species.

Premise Of The Study: Molecular genetic evidence can help delineate taxa in species complexes that lack diagnostic morphological characters. Pinus ponderosa (Pinaceae; subsection Ponderosae) is recognized as a problematic taxon: plastid phylogenies of exemplars were paraphyletic, and mitochondrial phylogeography suggested at least four subdivisions of P. ponderosa.

Mitochondrial DNA haplotype distribution patterns in Pinus ponderosa (Pinaceae): range-wide evolutionary history and implications for conservation.

Premise Of The Study: Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Douglas ex P. Lawson & C. Lawson) exhibits complicated patterns of morphological and genetic variation across its range in western North America.