The genetic consequences of dispersal and immigration in a wild great tit population

Understanding how dispersal impacts the genetic makeup of populations is essential for predicting their responses to environmental change. Gene flow—via within-population dispersal and external immigration—shapes population health and evolutionary potential by boosting genetic diversity, but it can also counteract local adaptation. We investigate these processes in a population of great tits (Parus major) in Wytham Woods, United Kingdom. This system represents a large, continuous population of a vagile, widely distributed species. Using a comprehensive social pedigree alongside two genomic datasets, one with 949 individuals genotyped at 600,000 SNPs and another with 2,644 individuals typed at 10,000 SNPs, we demonstrate spatial genetic structure largely driven by the spatial and temporal clustering of close kin. We quantify how temporally persistent this pattern is and find that relatedness declines with geographic distance in a consistent manner across years, without a consistent genetic basis, a pattern which is frequently renewed due to high population turnover. Immigrants make up a substantial portion of the breeding population, yet are often assumed to be genetically distinct, unrelated, and outbred—assumptions that can bias population inferences. We show that immigrants are indeed outbred, as are local birds; have fewer close relatives within the population, and are less likely to be related to their neighbours than locally born birds. Despite low FST and no clear genome-wide population structure, immigrants and locals can be distinguished above chance using a Random Forest classifier trained on SNP data. Our study highlights the complex interplay between dispersal, population turnover and spatial population structure, and suggests that great tits in Wytham Woods experience substantial gene flow within the population and from immigrants, maintaining high genetic diversity and reducing the possibility of local adaptation at this spatial scale.