Role of ecological characteristics
Both pairwise intraspecific geographical and genetic distances were plotted in subsets of ecological properties (see above). Subsequently, sampling variables (i.e., the number of sampled localities, the number of sampled specimens and the mean geographic distance among sampled individuals per species) were plotted against test statistics and significance to investigate the degree of their correlation. To check for the role of sampling design on the meta-analyses through plot choice, we compared statistics and significance scores of every species against the other variables with the number of individuals examined per species, the number of sampled localities and the mean geographic distance among sampled individuals per species.
To detect potential population genetic “anomalies” or “regularities” referable to ecological dynamics, we produced boxplots on all data and on subsets of data, observing the variance in the mean values of statistic and significance scores obtained as Mantel/NMDS/PCA output. We were aware that significance in major part is also dependent from the amount of intraspecific sampling of each species and the strength of the relation.