For my master’s I moved from fish to genes. I tested whether breaking up forest drains wildlife of genetic variety, across 104 species at once, using satellite maps and public genetic data.
Supervised by Dr. Colin Garroway and Dr. Stephen Petersen. Built on a genetic database created by Dr. Chloe Schmidt. MSc thesis, University of Manitoba, 2026.
Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Population genetics, the genetic make-up of a population, is where evolution plays out, so understanding it sharpens everything else in ecology.
The question I took on was a long-standing one: does breaking up habitat cost wildlife genetic diversity, and does that hold across species or only for some?
Wrote R code to search two public data repositories, Dryad and DataONE, and pulled 1,113 results.
Applied set criteria and added 12 new studies to Dr. Schmidt’s database, for 122 studies, 104 species and 2,233 sites.
Standardized coordinates, and read locations off published maps in QGIS where none were given.
Used Python to process 24 years of European Space Agency land-cover maps and measure four kinds of fragmentation within 10 km of every site.
Fit Bayesian models that compare species fairly, corrected for sites near each other looking alike, and checked the results against other model types.
A 143-page thesis, presented at the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution in 2024 and 2025.
Where forest was broken up, mammals and amphibians carried less genetic variety. Birds barely registered it.
The pattern only appeared when all four measures of fragmentation were analysed together. Looked at one at a time, it vanished. Species also differed, and some even had more variety in broken-up forest.
More forest around a site
More forest, more variety. Birds: no clear link.
More forest edge around a site
More edge, less variety. Birds: no clear link.
In the thesis I set out why fragmentation’s effect on genes is hard to pin down. Here are a few of the reasons.
In the thesis: .