Relationship between population fluctuation pattern and spatial genetic structure in grey-sided vole populations in Hokkaido, Japan

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Population Ecology, which is aimed to analyze patterns of population dynamics and spatial distribution and to elucidate mechanisms generating those patterns, is one of research fields of Ecology. Ecological studies on rodent populations have traditionally led this research field since Charles S. Elton (1924). Studies on rodent populations in Hokkaido, Japan have been well known with rich time series data sets. Although various analyses of temporal changes in rodent abundance have been done using those data sets, the relationship between temporal changes in abundance and spatial structure of the populations is a new perspective of this research field.In this study, we focus a geographic gradient of the pattern of population dynamics observed in grey-sided vole populations in Hokkaido: populations in north-eastern parts are cyclic, whereas those in south-western parts are non-cyclic and we expected that genetic spatial structure of the populations show a similar geographic gradient. However, the genetic spatial structure was more complex than expected. Genetic distances were short among some remote populations and genetic distances among some neighboring populations were long as well as those among remote populations. Those results indicate that genetic spatial structure of the vole population was not formed by geographic factors (distance or topography) and that ecological factors may be more important.Problems on complex genetic spatial structure have recently attracts many researchers and may develop to a hot topic in Molecular Ecology. This study may contribute to this research field by suggesting importance of ecological factors on those problems.