The advent of molecular epidemiology has greatly improved our ability to identify population sources and track pathogen movement. Yet the wide spatial and temporal scales usually considered are useful only to infer historical migration pathways. In this study, Bayesian genetic assignments and a landscape epidemiology approach were combined to unravel genetic origin and annual spread during a single epidemic of a plant pathogen: the poplar rust fungus Melampsora larici-populina. The study focused on a particular...

Natural hybridization is attracting much interest in modern speciation and conservation biology studies, but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In particular, it is unclear why environmental changes often increase hybridization rates. To study this question, we surveyed mating events in a mixed oak stand and developed a spatially-explicit individual-based hybridization model. This model, where hybridization is frequency dependent, pollen is non-limiting and which allows immigrant pollen to compete with local pollen, takes into account...

Loci considered to be under selection are generally avoided in attempts to infer past demographic processes as they do not fit neutral model assumptions. However, opportunities to better reconstruct some aspects of past demography might thus be missed. Here we examined genetic differentiation between two sympatric European oak species with contrasting ecological dynamics (Quercus robur and Q. petraea) with both outlier (i.e. loci possibly affected by divergent selection between species or by hitchhiking effects with...