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Environmental heterogeneity and not vicariant biogeographic barriers generate community‐wide population structure in desert‐adapted snakes
Author(s) -
Myers Edward A.,
Xue Alexander T.,
Gehara Marcelo,
Cox Christian L.,
Davis Rabosky Alison R.,
LemosEspinal Julio,
MartínezGómez Juan E.,
Burbrink Frank T.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
molecular ecology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.619
H-Index - 225
eISSN - 1365-294X
pISSN - 0962-1083
DOI - 10.1111/mec.15182
Subject(s) - vicariance , population , geographical distance , biology , divergence (linguistics) , ecology , genetic divergence , isolation by distance , evolutionary biology , genetic structure , genetic variation , genetic diversity , phylogenetic tree , phylogeography , genetics , linguistics , philosophy , demography , sociology , gene
Abstract Genetic structure can be influenced by local adaptation to environmental heterogeneity and biogeographic barriers, resulting in discrete population clusters. Geographic distance among populations, however, can result in continuous clines of genetic divergence that appear as structured populations. Here, we evaluate the relevant importance of these three factors over a landscape characterized by environmental heterogeneity and the presence of a hypothesized biogeographic barrier in producing population genetic structure within 13 codistributed snake species using a genomic data set. We demonstrate that geographic distance and environmental heterogeneity across western North America contribute to population genomic divergence. Surprisingly, landscape features long thought to contribute to biogeographic barriers play little role in divergence community wide. Our results suggest that isolation by environment is the most important contributor to genomic divergence. Furthermore, we show that models of population clustering that incorporate spatial information consistently outperform nonspatial models, demonstrating the importance of considering geographic distances in population clustering. We argue that environmental and geographic distances as drivers of community‐wide divergence should be explored before assuming the role of biogeographic barriers.