Carabidae and Tenebrionidae diversity in the Great Basin Province of California.

The high desert regions of eastern California within the Great Basin are vast areas of shrub-dominated habitat heavily impacted by invasive exotic grasses and forbs. Trapping efforts within these areas provided distributional information about various surface-active arthropod taxa. Two groups with high species diversity and abundance encountered at our sites were the coleopteran families Carabidae and Tenebrionidae.

Return of a giant: DNA from archival museum samples helps to identify a unique cutthroat trout lineage formerly thought to be extinct.

Currently one small, native population of the culturally and ecologically important Lahontan cutthroat trout (, LCT, Federally listed) remains in the Truckee River watershed of northwestern Nevada and northeastern California. The majority of populations in this watershed were extirpated in the 1940s due to invasive species, overharvest, anthropogenic water consumption and changing precipitation regimes. In 1977, a population of cutthroat trout discovered in the Pilot Peak Mountains in the Bonneville basin of Utah, was putatively identified as the extirpated LCT lacustrine lineage native to Pyramid Lake in the Truckee River basin based on morphological and meristic characters.

Native fishes in the Truckee River: Are in-stream structures and patterns of population genetic structure related?

In-stream structures are recognized as significant impediments to movement for freshwater fishes. Apex predators such as salmonids have been the focus of much research on the impacts of such barriers to population dynamics and population viability however much less research has focused on native fishes, where in-stream structures may have a greater impact on long term population viability of these smaller, less mobile species. Patterns of genetic structure on a riverscape can provide information on which structures represent real barriers to movement for fish species and under what specific flow conditions.

Strong founder effects and low genetic diversity in introduced populations of Coqui frogs.

The success of non-native species may depend on the genetic resources maintained through the invasion process. The Coqui (Eleutherodactylus coqui), a frog endemic to Puerto Rico, was introduced to Hawaii in the late 1980s via the horticulture trade, and has become an aggressive invader. To explore whether genetic diversity and population structure changed with the introduction, we assessed individuals from 15 populations across the Hawaiian Islands and 13 populations across Puerto Rico using six to nine polymorphic microsatellite loci and five dorsolateral colour patterns.