| Summary: | Habitat fragmentation is perhaps the most important issue facing
conservation efforts today. Forests in BC are becoming increasingly fragmented
and knowledge about how species respond to different types of forest fragmentation
is important for effective management of biological resources. This thesis attempts
to use genetic techniques to address this issue. The population genetic structure of
masked shrews, Sorex cinereus, was measured for a population in an
experimentally fragmented forest near Sicamous Creek, BC. Two highly
polymorphic microsatellite markers revealed a significant deficit of heterozygotes in
the population (Fis=0.31), which has not previously been reported for shrew
populations but may be partly due to the presence of null alleles at these loci.
Estimates of pairwise relatedness reveal family structure in the population, wherein
related individuals tend to be sampled near one another. This may explain the
significant difference that is observed in allelic and genotypic distributions between
forest treatment blocks, despite the low FST over the study site (0.006). No
significant difference in population structure between types of harvest treatments
and the uncut controls was observed. Since only 3 generations of shrews have
passed since logging of the study site, these results describe the short-term impact
of forest harvest on the population structure of masked shrews and should be
supplemented with future studies in order to gauge the long-term effects of habitat
fragmentation on the population. === Medicine, Faculty of === Medical Genetics, Department of === Graduate
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