Next, we had Dr. Andrea Estandia talking about 'Spatial scales of genomic adaptation to climate and phenology in the winter moth' 🦋 #ESEB2025

Congrats, Wenyuan! 👏

Our study highlights the complex interplay between dispersal, population turnover and spatial population structure, and suggests that great tits in Wytham Woods experience substantial gene flow within the population and from immigrants, maintaining high genetic diversity.

We also show that immigrants are outbred, as are local birds; have fewer close relatives within the population, and are less likely to be related to their neighbours than locally born birds.

Despite extremely low FST and no clear genome-wide population structure, immigrants and locals can be distinguished above chance using a Random Forest classifier trained on SNP data.

We quantify how temporally persistent this pattern is and find similar levels of decay of relatedness with distance across years, without a consistent genetic basis, which is frequently renewed due to high population turnover.

We observe some spatial genetic structure largely driven by the spatial and temporal clustering of close kin.

Thank youuu!