Population genomic insights into recent nutria (<em>Myocastor coypus</em>) invasion dynamics

Nutria (Myocastor coypus) are semi‐aquatic rodents native to South America, introduced to the USA for fur farming during the early twentieth century. This species' herbivory can cause extensive damage to agriculture and wetland ecosystems. Although declared eradicated from California, USA, in the 1970s, nutria populations were recently discovered in the state's Central Valley and subsequently in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, areas of significant agricultural and conservation importance. We report the use of a combination of nuclear single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and mitochondrial (mtDNA; cytochrome b locus) markers to characterize the source and demographic history of the current invasion, to inform eradication efforts. Our study is the first to develop a SNP dataset for nutria, utilizing 6809 loci to characterize genetic diversity in comparison to several potential source populations. Multivariate analysis and Bayesian clustering of the SNP dataset found the greatest simila..., , # Data from: Population genomic insights into recent nutria (*Myocastor coypus*) invasion dynamics Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.f1vhhmh92](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f1vhhmh92) ## Description of the data and file structure VCF files (RADseq SNP dataset) and FASTA files (mitochondrial Cyt b and D-loop) Individual FASTQ files can be found on NCBI's Sequence Read Archive: BioProject PRJNA1328208 (accession numbers SAMN51307640-SAMN51307946). Novel mitochondrial sequences were uploaded to NCBI GenBank under accession numbers PX240733-35.\ Sample metadata can be found in the supplemental materials (Table S1) of the publication. ### Files and variables #### File: finalRADseq_filtered_all.vcf **Description:** final filtered dataset with all 6809 SNP loci and all individuals. This was used for all analyses except for the \"private allele\" analyses described below. In some instances this VCF was subsampled by individual for computational efficiency or to avoid sample size biases - see ...,