I am trying to determine the genetic differentiation between various groups of populations based on Nei’s genetic distance. For the fixation index Fst Wright (1978) has suggested qualitative guidelines for interpretation:
From 0 to 0.05 may be considered as indicating little genetic differentiation;
From 0.05 to 0.15 indicates moderate genetic differentiation;
From 0.15 to 0.25 indicates very great genetic differentiation;
Above 0.25 indicates very great genetic differentiation.
Is there a similar guideline for Nei’s genetic distance?
By the way, I am working with ISSR. That is why I only have Nei’s genetic distance and φPT genetic differentiation.
Also the suggested ranges for Wright 's fixation index are more a rule of thumb and you should not rely on them too much, since they are for biallelic markers. For highly polymorphic and multiallelic markers, values will be much lower which might lead to a completely wrong interpretation.
Because of this I'd avoid such generalising guidelines, but do a comparison with data from other works that used the same or different species with perhaps similar biology (e.g. in terms of their biology, dispersal, mating system, overwintering, etc) or in a similar situation (e.g. if you look for possible dispersal barriers).
And finally a good approach for genetic distance is often doing an Isolation by distance analysis, as it gives you an idea about the correlation between genetic and geographic distance (which you can also do statistic tests if you want).
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