Dispersal is a biological process performed in three stages: emigration, transfer and immigration. Intra-specific variation on dispersal behavior, such as sex-bias, is very common in nature, particularly in birds and mammals. However, dispersal is difficult to measure in the field and many hypotheses concerning the causes of sex-biased dispersal remain without empirical confirmation. An importa...

Limited seed or pollen dispersal enhances spatial genetic relatedness between individuals (fine-scale spatial genetic structure, FSGS), which usually decreases as a function of physical distance. However, such isotropic pattern of FSGS may not always occur when spatially asymmetric processes, for instance, wind direction during dispersal, are considered in wind-pollinated and -dispersed plants....

Dispersal modulates gene flow throughout a population's spatial range. Gene flow affects adaptation at local spatial scales, and consequently impacts the evolution of reproductive isolation. A recent theoretical investigation has demonstrated that local adaptation along an environmental gradient, facilitated by the evolution of limited dispersal, can lead to parapatric speciation even in the ab...

We investigate the evolution of manipulation of host dispersal behaviour by parasites using spatially explicit individual-based simulations. We find that when dispersal is local, parasites always gain from increasing their hosts' dispersal rate, although the evolutionary outcome is determined by the costs-to-benefits ratio. However, when dispersal can be non-local, we show that parasites invest...

Dispersal is a context-dependent adaptive trait. Different dispersal strategies arise as species need to optimize their fitness in the ever changing quality of habitats further imposed by abiotic and biotic factors. This work reviews the spread of populations under different dispersal strategies. Namely, we address the spread of a population when dispersal is driven by habitat fragmentations, d...

Late Ordovician strata within the Cincinnati Basin record a mass faunal migration event during the C4 and C5 depositional sequences. The geographic source region for the invaders and the paleoceanographic conditions that facilitated dispersal into the Cincinnati Basin has previously been poorly understood. Using Parsimony Analysis of Endemicity, biogeographic relationships among Laurentian and ...

Despite the considerable evidence showing that dispersal between habitat patches is often asymmetric, most of the metapopulation models assume symmetric dispersal. In this paper, we develop a Monte Carlo simulation model to quantify the effect of asymmetric dispersal on metapopulation persistence. Our results suggest that metapopulation extinctions are more likely when dispersal is asymmetric. ...