An inbreeding perspective on the effectiveness of wildlife population defragmentation measures: A case study on wild boar (Sus scrofa) of Veluwe, The Netherlands

Pervasive inbreeding is a major genetic threat of population fragmentation and can undermine the efficacy of population connectivity measures. Nevertheless, few studies have evaluated whether wildlife crossings can alleviate the frequency and length of genomic autozygous segments. Here, we provided a genomic inbreeding perspective on the potential effectiveness of mammal population defragmentation measures. We applied a SNP-genotyping case study on the ~2500 wild boar Sus scrofa population of Veluwe, The Netherlands, a 1000-km2 Natura 2000 protected area with many fences and roads but also, increasingly, fence openings and wildlife crossings. We combined a 20K genotyping assessment of genetic status and migration rate with a simulation that examined the potential for alleviation of isolation and inbreeding. We found that Veluwe wild boar subpopulations are significantly differentiated (FST-values of 0.02-0.07) and have low levels of gene flow. One noteworthy exception was the Central an..., Using animals culled within population management programs as well as traffic victimes, samples were collected of wild boar from Veluwe (The Netherlands) and reference populations in Northwestern Europe. DNA was extracted and genotyped using porcine SNP-chips., , # SNP genotypes of wild boar of Veluwe (Sus scrofa) and reference populations

Dataset underlying the article: De Jong et al. (2024) An inbreeding perspective on the effectiveness of wildlife population defragmentation measures - a case study on wild boar (Sus scrofa) of Veluwe, The Netherlands

The dataset contains individual information and SNP genotypes of wild boar (Sus scrofa) of populations of Northwest Europe, along with the R-script used to analyze the genotype data for the accompanying research article.

Part of these genotypes have been presented earlier. Wild boar samples from the Netherlands are obtained from Goedbloed et al. 2012; wild boar samples from Luxemburg, France and Germany are obtained from De Jong et al. 2023). New in this dataset is the much larger number of samples from Veluwe, The Netherlands, which allowed for examination of the spatial genetic structure and inbreeding status.

Samples were obtained from animals culled within ongoing population management a...