Seascape genomics uncovers contrasting population genetic structures in reef corals

Understanding how abiotic conditions shape biodiversity and population connectivity is essential for predicting climate change impacts and guiding conservation efforts. Coral reefs face severe losses, making effective conservation strategies increasingly urgent. Here, we use a seascape genomics approach to examine the population genetic structure of three non-model scleractinian corals around the Arabian Peninsula, an overlooked region with peculiar oceanographic features. Our results reveal contrasting patterns of genetic structure across species, which we further integrate with geographic distances, larval dispersal models, and environmental data. We show that population structure is shaped both by isolation by distance (IBD) and isolation by resistance (IBR), with environmental gradients often covarying with spatial separation. Our findings offer new insights into coral diversification and evolutionary dynamics facing the unique conditions around the Arabian Peninsula. This work also provides a transferable methodological framework to advance our understanding of processes structuring reef populations, thereby informing efforts to design robust marine protected area networks in the face of global climate change and biodiversity loss. This deposit contains the command lines, scripts, and analysis files related to Oury et al. Seascape genomics uncovers contrasting population genetic structures in reef corals.