Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons^™

Phylogeny And Evolution Of Swallows (Hirundinidae) With A Transcriptomic Perspective On Seasonal Migration, Clare Elisabeth Brown

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Evolutionary biology seeks to understand the forces that have generated and shaped patterns of diversity. In this dissertation, I investigated phylogenetic relationships and the evolution of three traits—migration, nest-type, and geographic distribution—in the swallow family (Hirundinidae), a globally distributed group of about 85 species of aerial insectivorous birds. I first applied a dataset of several thousand ultraconserved element (UCE) loci to reconstructing the phylogeny of the New World genus Tachycineta. Three methods of phylogenetic inference produced topologically discordant trees, but post-inference analyses provided evidence that the tree produced by maximum likelihood analysis of a concatenated data matrix is the most …