Publications by Kevin Leempoel

Locally Specific Genome-Wide Signatures of Adaptation to Environmental Variation at High Resolution in an Alpine Plant

Stéphane Joost, Kevin Leempoel, Annie Sandrine Guillaume

Microevolutionary processes shape adaptive responses to heterogeneous environments, where these effects vary both among and within species. However, it remains largely unknown to which degree signatures of adaptation to environmental drivers can be detecte ...

2025

Integrating very high resolution environmental proxies in genotype-environment association studies

Stéphane Joost, Kevin Leempoel, Annie Sandrine Guillaume

Landscape genomic analyses associating genetic variation with environmental variables are powerful tools for studying molecular signatures of species' local adaptation and for detecting candidate genes under selection. The development of landscape genomics ...

Wiley2024

Multiple genomic solutions for local adaptation in two closely related species (sheep and goats) facing the same climatic constraints

Stéphane Joost, Sylvie Stucki, Kevin Leempoel

The question of how local adaptation takes place remains a fundamental question in evolutionary biology. The variation of allele frequencies in genes under selection over environmental gradients remains mainly theoretical and its empirical assessment would ...

2023

Multiscale Very High Resolution Topographic Models in Alpine Ecology: Pros and Cons of Airborne LiDAR and Drone-Based Stereo-Photogrammetry Technologies

Stéphane Joost, Estelle Rochat, Kevin Leempoel, Annie Sandrine Guillaume, Aude Rogivue

The vulnerability of alpine environments to climate change presses an urgent need to accurately model and understand these ecosystems. Popularity in the use of digital elevation models (DEMs) to derive proxy environmental variables has increased over the p ...

2021

Rapid identification and interpretation of gene‐environment associations using the new R.SamBada landscape genomics pipeline

Stéphane Joost, Oliver Michele Selmoni, Estelle Rochat, Sylvie Stucki, Kevin Leempoel, Elia Vajana, Solange Catherine Gaillard

Samβada is a genome‐environment association (GEA) software, designed to search for signatures of local adaptation. However, pre‐ and post‐processing of data can be labour‐intensive, preventing wider uptake of the method. We have now developed R.SamBada, an ...

2019

Multiscale landscape genomic models to detect signatures of selection in the alpine plant Biscutella laevigata

Stéphane Joost, Kevin Leempoel

Plant species are known to adapt locally to their environment, particularly in mountainous areas where conditions can vary drastically over short distances. The climate of such landscapes being largely influenced by topography, using fine-scale models to e ...

2018

Simple rules for an efficient use of Geographic Information Systems in molecular ecology

Stéphane Joost, Estelle Rochat, Kevin Leempoel, Ivo Widmer, Solange Catherine Gaillard

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are becoming increasingly popular in the context of molecular ecology and conservation biology thanks to their display options efficiency, flexibility and management of geodata. Indeed, spatial data for wildlife and liv ...

2017

Very high resolution digital elevation models: are multi-scale derived variables ecologically relevant?

Stéphane Joost, Kevin Leempoel, Pascal Vittoz

Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) are often used in landscape ecology to retrieve elevation or first derivative terrain attributes such as slope or aspect in the context of species distribution modelling. However, DEM-derived variables are scale-dependent an ...

Wiley-Blackwell2015

Multi-scale landscape genomic models : the role of very high resolution digital elevation models in evolutionary biology

Kevin Leempoel

Environmental heterogeneity is one of the main actors of biodiversity and species adaptation as it exerts a selective pressure on observable characteristics of living organisms. Consequently, local adaptation favours certain genetic variants and, by doing ...

EPFL2015

Dynamics in mangroves assessed by high-resolution and multi-temporal satellite data: a case study in Zhanjiang Mangrove National Nature Reserve (ZMNNR), P. R. China (vol 10, pg 5681, 2013)

Kevin Leempoel, Jian Wang

Copernicus Gesellschaft Mbh2013