Abstract
In South Korea, expanding wild boar populations have increased concerns regarding human-wildlife conflict and the spread of African swine fever (ASF). Yet their population genetic structure and connectivity remain poorly understood, limiting effective wildlife and disease management. We present the most comprehensive population-genetic analysis of wild boars (Sus scrofa) in South Korea, using 13 polymorphic microsatellite loci and1,813 individuals collected nationwide between 2019 and 2023. Overall, wild boars exhibited high genetic diversity across the peninsula with moderate regional variation. Gangwon region showed the highest diversity (NA = 7.3, HO = 0.70), whereas Jeolla region exhibited the lowest (NA = 6.6, HO = 0.61). Mild heterozygote deficits and non-random allelic associations suggested fine-scale population structuring, particularly in Chungcheong region. Pairwise FST values indicated low but statistically significant genetic differentiation, with Gyeonggi and Gangwon forming a largely continuous genetic unit, while Jeolla was the most differentiated. The comparatively high differentiation between Chungcheong and Jeolla, despite their geographic proximity, suggests that the Geum River and associated landscape features reduce connectivity beyond that expected from geographic distance alone. Bayesian clustering analyses revealed two primary genetic clusters with additional hierarchical subdivision, while discriminant analysis of principal components indicated gradual geographic differentiation among predefined regional groups and extensive overlap among neighbouring populations. Significant isolation by distance and AMOVA further demonstrated that most genetic variation is maintained within individuals despite detectable regional genetic structure. These findings demonstrate that South Korean wild boars maintain high genetic diversity alongside stable regional genetic structure, shaped by habitat configuration, riverine barriers, and historical dispersal processes. This genetic framework provides a basis for regionally coordinated ASF surveillance and spatially informed wildlife management in South Korea.
Acknowledgements
We appreciate the dedication of the field researchers and NIBR staff who collected and provided the samples.
Funding
This work was supported by the grant from the National Institute of Biological Resources (NIBR), funded by the Ministry of Environment (MOE) of the Republic of Korea (NIBR202102112, NIBR202218101, and NIBR202305102).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Supplementary Material 1 (download PDF )
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International 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 author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence 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 licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence 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. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pandey, P., Hong, Y., Park, HC. et al. Population genetics of wild boars across South Korea shows broad-scale distance-driven structure and a region-specific riverine barrier.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-68292-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-68292-1
Keywords
Sus scrofa
- Microsatellite
- Gene flow
- African swine fever (ASF)
- Genetic diversity
- Population structure
Source: Ecology - nature.com
