Estimating migration of the cold-tolerant leaf beetle Gonioctena quinquepunctata inside a mountain range in a spatially explicit context

The cold-tolerant leaf beetle Gonioctena quinquepunctata displays a large but fragmented European distribution and is restricted to mountain regions in the southern part of its range. Using a RAD-seq-generated large SNP data set (> 10,000 loci), we investigated the geographic distribution of genetic variation within the Vosges mountains, where the species is common. To translate this pattern of variation in an estimate of its capacity to disperse, we simulated SNP data under a spatially explicit model of population evolution and compared the simulated and real data with an approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) approach. For this purpose, we propose a new SNP statistic summarizing genetic variation in a spatially explicit context. The estimated number of effective migrants inferred with this statistic was compared to that derived from a combination of standard population genetic statistics often used in population genetic analyses. We conducted this ABC analysis with a relatively low...