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Exploring Signals Of Historical Demography In Boreal Mammals Through Integration Of Statistical Conservation Phylogenetics, Taxonomy, And Comparative Phylogeography, Jason Malaney

Biology ETDs

Understanding how diversity is partitioned across the landscape can provide perspectives related to the environmental processes that have influenced the evolutionary history of organisms. This main idea, often termed phylogeography, serves as the backdrop to my research where I explore three broad concepts including historical biogeography, cryptic diversity and ecology, and conservation phylogenetics. I address various questions in each of these concepts by using a set of mammals that are associated with montane and mesic environments of North America. More specifically, I focus on the jumping mice (Zapodidae) to test hypotheses that scale to the broader community. This approach allows …