SUPR
Origin of the Swedish wolf population
Dnr:

NAISS 2023/23-668

Type:

NAISS Small Storage

Principal Investigator:

Pierre De Wit

Affiliation:

Göteborgs universitet

Start Date:

2024-01-26

End Date:

2025-02-01

Primary Classification:

10615: Evolutionary Biology

Webpage:

Allocation

Abstract

The Swedish wolf population went extinct in the 1960s. Sweden was then recolonized with a single pair of breeding wolves, creating a highly inbred population. Since then, a few more immigrants have added genetic variation to the population, but it is still quite low in diversity. The genetics of the population has been studied with microsatellite loci, but there is now quite a lot of genomic data from the Swedish wolves and potential source populations in Finland and Russia. We aim here to use the genomic data to learn from which source population the original colonizing pair came from, and also from where the subsequent immigrants have come from.