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High Connectivity And Minimal Genetic Structure Among North American Boreal Owl (Aegolius Funereus) Populations, Regardless Of Habitat Matrix, M. E. Koopman, G. D. Hayward, David Mcdonald
High Connectivity And Minimal Genetic Structure Among North American Boreal Owl (Aegolius Funereus) Populations, Regardless Of Habitat Matrix, M. E. Koopman, G. D. Hayward, David Mcdonald
David McDonald
Habitat connectivity and corridors are often assumed to be critical for the persistence of patchily distributed populations, but empirical evidence for this assumption is scarce. We assessed the importance of connectivity among habitat patches for dispersal by a mature-forest obligate, the Boreal Owl (Aegolius funereus). Boreal Owls demonstrated a lack of genetic structure (theta = 0.004 +/- 0.002 [SE]) among subpopulations, regardless of matrix type and extent, which indicates that unforested matrix does not act as a barrier to dispersal for this vagile species. We found only slightly higher genetic distances (Cavalli-Sforza chord distances ranged from 0.015 to 0.025) among …