The role of molecular genetics in sculpting the future of integrative biogeography

Abstract

We review the expanding role of molecular genetics in the emergence of a vibrant and vital integrative biogeography. The enormous growth over the past several decades in the number and variety of molecular-based phylogenetic and population genetics studies has become the core information used by biogeographers to reconstruct the causal connections between historical evolutionary and ecological attributes of taxa and biotas, and the landscapes and seascapes that contain them. A proliferation of different approaches, sequences, and genomes have provided for the integration of a `biogeography of the Late Neogene' with other Earth and biological sciences under the rubrics of phylogeography, landscape genetics, and phylochronology. Approaches designed explicitly to take advantage of unique properties of molecular genetic information have led to the re-emergence of dispersal as an analytically tractable process that historical biogeographers can now use, along with vicariance, to reconstruct the geographical context of diversification. Concomitant with the expanding amount of information available, molecular data sets often provide for estimates of lineage divergence dates, and analytical tools for doing so continue to improve. The comparability of molecular-based estimates of phylogenetic and population genetic histories across non-related taxa has stimulated deployment of new methods to test for spatial and temporal congruence across co-distributed taxa and ecosystems, and thus increased rigour in hypothesis-testing. We illustrate how a molecular genetics framework has provided robust and novel reconstructions of historical biogeographical pattern and process in three different systems, and finish with some thoughts on the role a molecular genetic-based biogeography will play in predicting alternative futures of biodiversity.

Chromosome Variation, Genomics, Speciation and Evolution in <i>Sceloporus</i> Lizards

“…Although a detailed phylogeographic review of speciation patterns in Sceloporus ' sister clades forming the Phrynosomatinae is beyond the scope of the present work, the wealth of phylogenetic data available for the radiations of Phrynosoma [Upton and Murphy, 1997;Zamudio et al, 1997;Leaché and McGuire, 2006], the sand lizards, Uma , Holbrookia and Callisaurus [Wilgenbusch and de Queiroz, 2000;Lindell et al, 2008], Sceloporus ' sister clades Petrosaurus [Aguilars-S et al, 1988], Uta [Upton and Murphy, 1997;Hollingsworth, 1999], and Urosaurus [Lindell et al, 2005] all seem to tell the same story. All these genera seem to be centered in the warm North American deserts, where much of their speciation is consistent with geographic fragmentation of lineages already existing in the Miocene and Pliocene, contemporaneous with origins and evolution of the North American deserts and the opening of the Gulf of California to form insular land masses, eventually coalescing as the present day Baja California Peninsula [Hall, 1973;Sites et al, 1992;Murphy and Aguirre-Léon, 2002;Riddle and Hafner, 2006;Riddle et al, 2008].…”

Integrating systematics and biogeography to disentangle the roles of history and ecology in biotic assembly

“…1). Because the origin of a barrier can induce speciation across multiple lineages within an assemblage, single vicariant events often result in congruent distributional patterns of phylogenetic relatedness among allopatric sister species, or across entire biotas (Nelson & Platnick, 1981;Riddle et al, 2008;Morrone, 2014). Consequently, vicariant speciation necessarily results in patterns of phylogenetic overdispersion.…”

Phylogenetic relationships of megophryid frogs of the genus Leptobrachium (Amphibia, Anura) as revealed by mtDNA gene sequences

“…Often the estimated dates have extensive variance and overlap, yet they can serve as biogeographical hypotheses in the absence of detailed geological information, and can even predict unknown geological events (Lindell et al, 2006;Riddle et al, 2008).…”