Science And Fisheries Thesaurus Environmental Factors,...

Keywords from the Aquatic Science Fisheries Thesaurus: Environmental factors, Genetic diversity, Fjords, Marine fish, Marine Biodiversity, 1. Introduction Marine environmental landscape parameters play an important role in promoting population genetic differentiation in marine organisms (Selkoe et al., 2008). Consequently, identifying environmental parameters that promote population genetic differentiation is a major focus of study in evolutionary biology (Selkoe et al., 2008). Most research on the effects of the environmental marine landscape on the genetics of population structure has been qualitative (e.g. JÃ ¸rgensen et al., 2005; Galindo et al., 2006). However, this descriptive interpretation may not always be completely successful in identifying the factors that are responsible for the observed genetic structure of natural populations, and most importantly, they do not evaluate explicitly the environmental factors. In fact, few studies evaluate both: genetic and marine environmental data (Galindo et al., 2006). Manel et al. (2003) introduced the landscape genetic concept, which is able to explain spatial genetic patterns through out landscape features (i.e. geographic, physic and chemical variables) and spatial statistics (Manel et al., 2003; Storfer et al., 2007). Although useful, most studies that used this approach have been performed in terrestrial organisms, leaving marine and freshwater organisms mostly unexplored (Storfer et al., 2010). Recently, concepts like