2.8 Population genetic indicators for conservation recommendations
Following the framework proposed by Ottewell et al. (2016) for conservation planning, we calculated three population genetic indicators: genetic differentiation (F ST), genetic diversity (observed and expected heterozygosity,H O and H E) and inbreeding coefficient (F IS). To identify conservation management units and set conservation priorities, we analyzed the population genetic structure as outlined by Fraser & Bernatchez (2001) using two primary approaches: (1) Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA): We generated genetic distance-based PCoA plots in GeneAlEx (Peakall & Smouse, 2012) to visualize genetic relationships among populations; (2) Clustering Analysis: We inferred the optimal number of genetic clusters (K ) in STRUCTURE (Pritchard et al. , 2000) using 10,000 burnin and 100,000 MCMC generations, with ten replicates per K value, testing up to K equal to the number of populations plus two. The most likely K was determined following Evanno et al. (2005) approach as implemented in Structure Harvester (Earl & vonHoldt, 2012), and the results were visualized with StructuRly (Criscuolo & Angelini, 2020). File format conversions between software were conducted in PGDSpider (Lischer & Excoffier, 2012).