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Does Niche Divergence Accompany Allopatric Divergence In Aphelocoma Jays As Predicted Under Ecological Speciation?: Insights From Tests With Niche Models, John Mccormack, Amanda Zellmer, L. Knowles

John E. McCormack

The role of ecology in the origin of species has been the subject of long-standing interest to evolutionary biologists. New sources of spatially explicit ecological data allow for large-scale tests of whether speciation is associated with niche divergence or whether closely related species tend to be similar ecologically (niche conservatism). Because of the confounding effects of spatial autocorrelation of environmental variables, we generate null expectations for niche divergence for both an ecological-niche modeling and a multivariate approach to address the question: do allopatrically distributed taxa occupy similar niches? In a classic system for the study of niche evolution—the Aphelocoma jays—we …