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Over recent decades, global human transportation networks have led to the establishment of once geographically restricted species into new ecosystems (Hulme, 2009;Hulme et al., 2008;Roderick & Navajas, 2015;Sinclair et al., 2020). While many introduced taxa go unnoticed, some may act as "ecosystem engineers" by altering abiotic and biotic factors, leading to changes in the structure of the original ecosystem (Jones et al., 1994); such non-native taxa may then be called invasive because of their negative impact on ecosystem

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Climate-driven changes in hydrological regimes are of global importance and are particularly significant in riparian ecosystems. Riparian ecosystems in California provide refuge to many native and vulnerable species within a xeric landscape. California Tetragnatha spiders play a key role in riparian ecosystems, serving as a link between terrestrial and aquatic elements. Their tight reliance on water paired with the widespread distributions of many species make them ideal candidates to better understand the relative role of waterways versus geographic distance in shaping population structure. To assist in better understanding population structure, we constructed a reference genome assembly for T. versicolor using long read sequencing, scaffolded with proximity-ligation Omni-C data. The near-chromosome-level assembly is comprised of 174 scaffolds spanning 1.06 Gigabase pairs, with a scaffold N50 of 64.1 megabase pairs and BUSCO completeness of 97.6%. This reference genome will facilitate future study of T. versicolor population structure associated with the rapidly changing environment of California.

Islands have inspired biologists for hundreds of years as locations that foster unique biotic assemblages and provide insights into ecological and evolutionary processes dictating life globally. Although by classic definition islands are subcontinental land masses surrounded by water, from a biological perspective, islands can be defined broadly as any isolated piece of habitat that is surrounded by distinct environmental conditions. Therefore the study of island biology applies to any area that is habitable for a given set of organisms and is separated from a source by an inhospitable matrix. Biological islands can include lakes surrounded by land and mountaintops, caves, and land fragments surrounded by habitat in which an organism of interest cannot survive or reproduce. Given sufficient isolation, these attributes can result in a distinctive biota.