Environmental Drivers of Dispersal in Black-and-White Ruffed Lemurs (Varecia variegata)
type: CreativeWork
description: Dispersal is a fundamental aspect of primates’ lives, influencing population connectivity through gene flow, driving community structure and assembly, and having important consequences for adaptation and speciation. Primates disperse within an environmental context, with both intervening and local environmental factors affecting the motivation, capacity, timing, and success of dispersal at all phases. Direct evaluations of primate dispersal are challenging given the rarity of dispersal events and the large distances that animals often settle from their departure site, therefore indirect measures– such as the use of population genetic data– are more common. The field of landscape genetics enables researchers to combine population genetic data with landscape information to explicitly evaluate the influence of both local and intervening environmental variables in driving dispersal. To date, research in primate landscape genetics has primarily focused on the role of the intervening landscape in driving dispersal, while the effects of local habitat characteristics remain untested. Additionally, although the effect of environmental variables is likely scale dependent, no published studies have assessed the differential influence of environmental factors on smaller-scale gene flow resulting from typical dispersal events compared to multigenerational gene flow at larger geographic scales. Therefore, the primary goal of this dissertation was to use a landscape genetics approach to examine the influence of both between- and within-site environmental variables in driving short-range black-and-white ruffed lemur (Varecia variegata) dispersal in the Ranomafana National Park (RNP) and adjacent Ambositra-Vondrozo Forest Corridor (COFAV) and compare results to published studies assessing the drivers of long-range dispersal. This dissertation had three main objectives: 1) Characterize habitat quality across the RNP-COFAV region using traditional botanical plots and transects to enab…
abstract: Dispersal is a fundamental aspect of primates’ lives, influencing population connectivity through gene flow, driving community structure and assembly, and having important consequences for adaptation and speciation. Primates disperse within an environmental context, with both intervening and local environmental factors affecting the motivation, capacity, timing, and success of dispersal at all phases. Direct evaluations of primate dispersal are challenging given the rarity of dispersal events and the large distances that animals often settle from their departure site, therefore indirect measures– such as the use of population genetic data– are more common. The field of landscape genetics enables researchers to combine population genetic data with landscape information to explicitly evaluate the influence of both local and intervening environmental variables in driving dispersal. To date, research in primate landscape genetics has primarily focused on the role of the intervening landscape in driving dispersal, while the effects of local habitat characteristics remain untested. Additionally, although the effect of environmental variables is likely scale dependent, no published studies have assessed the differential influence of environmental factors on smaller-scale gene flow resulting from typical dispersal events compared to multigenerational gene flow at larger geographic scales. Therefore, the primary goal of this dissertation was to use a landscape genetics approach to examine the influence of both between- and within-site environmental variables in driving short-range black-and-white ruffed lemur (Varecia variegata) dispersal in the Ranomafana National Park (RNP) and adjacent Ambositra-Vondrozo Forest Corridor (COFAV) and compare results to published studies assessing the drivers of long-range dispersal. This dissertation had three main objectives: 1) Characterize habitat quality across the RNP-COFAV region using traditional botanical plots and transects to enab…
author: Mancini, Amanda
keywords: Biological and Physical Anthropology, Madagascar, isolation-by-resistance, circuit theory, gravity models, landscape genetics, conservation
date published: 2023-02-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:58:22Z
provider: City University of New York - Graduate Center
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York