Biologists have developed a new method to measure the extent to which regional geographic features — including barriers between regions, like mountains or water — affect local rates of speciation, extinction and dispersal for species. As a test case, they successfully used their model to delineate the movement and diversification of neotropical anole lizards.
“Geographical features influence evolutionary outcomes in predictable ways,” said Michael Landis, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, first author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “Our study lays the statistical groundwork to model how different geographical features might act as barriers to species movement or might accelerate extinction for other groups besides anoles.
“Such inferences can also help us predict which species are most likely to move, evolve or go extinct as climate change intensifies,” he said.
Scientists have long recognized that geography plays a role in how species colonize new regions and whether widespread species eventually separate out into groups that become genetically distinct, losing the ability to reproduce with each other.
Read more at Washington University in St. Louis
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