Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

DOI

10.1038/s41598-026-40537-z

Publication Title

Scientific Reports

Volume

16

Issue

1

Pages

11037

Abstract

Urbanization is a dominant force driving destructive and irreversible changes of natural habitats in modern times. While the effects of urbanization on community composition and phenotypic responses are well-documented, its influence on genetic diversity and population structure remains understudied, particularly for invertebrates in subtropical regions. This study tested the hypothesis that urbanization reduces genetic diversity and increases population differentiation in the lynx spider Oxyopes sertatus, a common foliage-dwelling spider in Taiwan. We sampled 245 individuals from 17 sites distributed along an urban-rural gradient and quantified urbanization intensity using land-use composition at both landscape (4 km²) and local (0.25 km²) scales. Genetic diversity and population differentiation were assessed using mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (COI) and genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) generated via restriction site-associated DNA sequencing (RAD-seq). The results showed that genetic diversity declined with increasing urbanization intensity, with the strongest effects detected in genome-wide diversity indices. Urban populations also showed greater genetic differentiation compared to rural populations, indicating urban environments impose physical barriers to gene flow and elevate differentiation. However, STRUCTURE and principal component analysis (PCA) revealed no distinct genetic clusters, suggesting that dispersal may still occur. Our findings suggest that even a widespread and abundant spider species can undergo rapid genetic diversity loss in urban landscapes. These results highlight the importance of incorporating habitat connectivity into urban planning to maintain wildlife gene exchanges and support biodiversity in rapidly urbanizing regions.

Rights

© 2026 The Authors.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original authors and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Data Availability

Article states: "The raw sequencing reads from the RAD-seq analysis are deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) under BioProject accession PRJNA1346850 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/PRJNA1346850). The COI and processed RAD-seq datasets, along with the land use data used for the analyses in this study, are publicly available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18486231)."

Original Publication Citation

Lo, Y. Y., Wei, C., Chen, W. J., & Lin, C. P. (2026). Rapid urbanization reduces genetic diversity and increases genetic differentiation of a lynx spider Oxyopes sertatus in central Taiwan. Scientific Reports, 16(1), Article 11037. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-40537-z

ORCID

0009-0004-4140-0876 (Wei)

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