Recognizing the temporal distinctions between landscape genetics and phylogeography

The steadily advancing fields of landscape genetics and phylogeography share many goals. However, there are some very distinct differences between these two disciplines, including the kinds of data and analyses commonly used, the timescale over which these data are informative, and the hypotheses the data are used to examine. Recently, a number of studies appear to have confused or synonymized phylogeography and landscape genetics. The difference is not merely semantic; understanding the distinctions between these fields is important for ensuring that researchers are aware of the temporal scale over which their data are informative.