Fundamentally, gene flow is ensured when dispersal is followed by reproduction and subsequent offspring survival 6. Simultaneously, gene flow homogenizes allele frequency among populations, which counteracts the effects of local adaptation, reducing the mean fitness of populations (i.e., migration load) 2. By introducing foreign alleles to local populations, gene flow spreads adaptative changes and tends to alleviate the effect of inbreeding depression 1, 2, 3. Gene flow counterbalances natural selection and genetic drift, reshuffles mutations among spatial locations and contributes to shaping the contemporary spatial patterns of biodiversity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Our results offer great promises to untangle the eco-evolutionary forces that shape sedentary population structure and to anticipate climate-driven redistributions, altogether improving spatial conservation planning. We find that almost 70 % of observed variance in genetic differentiation is explained by coalescent connectivity over multiple generations, significantly outperforming other models. Unlike previous approaches, the latter unveil explicit parents-to-offspring links (filial connectivity) and implicit links among siblings from a common ancestor (coalescent connectivity). Here we use an extensive compilation of 58 population genetic studies of 47 phylogenetically divergent marine sedentary species over the Mediterranean basin to assess how genetic differentiation is predicted by Isolation-By-Distance, single-generation dispersal and multi-generation dispersal models. However, frequent mismatches between dispersal estimates and observed genetic diversity prevent an operational synthesis for eco-evolutionary projections. For species that disperse using atmospheric or oceanic flows, biophysical models allow predicting the migratory component of gene flow, which facilitates the interpretation of broad-scale spatial structure inferred from observed allele frequencies among populations. Gene flow governs the contemporary spatial structure and dynamic of populations as well as their long-term evolution.
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