Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Comparative Phylogeographic, Population Genomic, And Selection Inference With Development Of Hierarchical Co-Demographic Models, Alexander Xue
Comparative Phylogeographic, Population Genomic, And Selection Inference With Development Of Hierarchical Co-Demographic Models, Alexander Xue
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Comparing demographic histories across assemblages of populations, species, and sister pairs has been a focus in phylogeography since its inception. Initial approaches utilized organelle genetic data and involved qualitative comparisons of genetic patterns for evaluating hypotheses of shared evolutionary responses to past environmental changes. This endeavor has progressed with coalescent model-based statistical techniques and advances in next-generation sequencing, yet there remains a need for methods that can analyze aggregated genomic-scale data from non-model organisms within a unified framework that considers individual taxon uncertainty and variance. To this end, the aggregate site frequency spectrum (aSFS), an expansion of the site frequency …
Climate-Driven Habitat Shifts In South America: Biogeography, Historical Demography, And Population Genomics Of Anole Lizards, Ivan Prates
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Shifts in the geographic distribution of habitats over time can promote dispersal and vicariance, thereby influencing large-scale biogeographic patterns and ecological processes. The establishment of corridors of suitable habitat across previously disjunct yet ecologically similar regions has been widely linked to climate change over time. Such climate-mediated habitat changes may have played a key role in the assembly of tropical biotas, including those of Amazonia and the coastal Atlantic Forest in South America, two of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. The history of biogeographic associations between tropical rainforest habitats in response to former climatic shifts, as well as their …
Ecology, Evolution, And Sexual Selection In The Invasive, Globally Distributed Small Indian Mongoose (Urva Auropunctata), M. Aaron Owen
Ecology, Evolution, And Sexual Selection In The Invasive, Globally Distributed Small Indian Mongoose (Urva Auropunctata), M. Aaron Owen
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Introduced species provide rare opportunities to test evolutionary hypotheses in situ by creating so-called natural experiments. Natural experiments are situations in nature that resemble laboratory studies by allowing for comparisons of a “control” group (i.e., a species’ native range) with “experimental” groups (i.e., a species’ introduced range). In particular, introduced animals allow us to investigate evolutionary dynamics in complex, long-lived organisms in ways that would otherwise be impossible in a laboratory setting. One such introduced animal is the small Indian mongoose (Urva auropunctata, formerly Herpestes auropunctatus). Native to South Asia, the small Indian mongoose’s introduction to more …