10.5061/DRYAD.HJ2FK
Matocq, Marjorie D.
University of Nevada Reno
Kelly, Patrick A.
California State University, Stanislaus
Phillips, Scott E.
California State University, Stanislaus
Maldonado, Jesús E.
California State University, Stanislaus
Data from: Reconstructing the evolutionary history of an endangered
subspecies across the changing landscape of the Great Central Valley of
California.
Dryad
dataset
2012
2012-09-17T19:37:34Z
2012-09-17T19:37:34Z
en
https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.12079
45904423 bytes
1
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Identifying historic patterns of population genetic diversity and
connectivity is a primary challenge in efforts to re-establish the
processes that have generated and maintained genetic variation across
natural landscapes. The challenge of reconstructing pattern and process is
even greater in highly altered landscapes where population extinctions and
dramatic demographic fluctuations in remnant populations may have
substantially altered, if not eliminated, historic patterns. Here, we seek
to reconstruct historic patterns of diversity and connectivity in an
endangered subspecies of woodrat that now occupies only 1-2 remnant
locations within the highly altered landscape of the Great Central Valley
of California. We examine patterns of diversity and connectivity using 14
microsatellite loci and sequence data from a mitochondrial locus and a
nuclear intron. We reconstruct temporal change in habitat availability to
establish several historical scenarios that could have led to contemporary
patterns of diversity, and use an approximate Bayesian computation
approach to test which of these scenarios is most consistent with our
observed data. We find that the Central Valley populations harbour unique
genetic variation coupled with a history of admixture between two
well-differentiated species of woodrats that are currently restricted to
the woodlands flanking the Valley. Our simulations also show that certain
commonly used analytical approaches may fail to recover a history of
admixture when populations experience severe bottlenecks subsequent to
hybridization. Overall our study shows the strength of combining empirical
and simulation analyses to recover the history of populations occupying
highly altered landscapes.
Matocq_MEC-12-0389_fig01_dataMatocq_Kelly_Phillips_Maldonado_2012Locality,
individual, sequence and microsatellite dataset