title: Inferring responses to climate dynamics from historical demography in neotropical forest lizards.
abstract: We apply a comparative framework to test for concerted demographic changes in response to climate shifts in the neotropical lowland forests, learning from the past to inform projections of the future. Using reduced genomic (SNP) data from three lizard species codistributed in Amazonia and the Atlantic Forest (Anolis punctatus, Anolis ortonii, and Polychrus marmoratus), we first reconstruct former population history and test for assemblage-level responses to cycles of moisture transport recently implicated in changes of forest distribution during the Late Quaternary. We find support for population shifts within the time frame of inferred precipitation fluctuations (the last 250,000 y) but detect idiosyncratic responses across species and uniformity of within-species responses across forest regions. These results are incongruent with expectations of concerted population expansion in response to increased rainfall and fail to detect out-of-phase demographic syndromes (expansions vs. contractions) across forest regions. Using reduced genomic data to infer species-specific demographical parameters, we then model the plausible spatial distribution of genetic diversity in the Atlantic Forest into future climates (2080) under a medium carbon emission trajectory. The models forecast very distinct trajectories for the lizard species, reflecting unique estimated population densities and dispersal abilities. Ecological and demographic constraints seemingly lead to distinct and asynchronous responses to climatic regimes in the tropics, even among similarly distributed taxa. Incorporating such constraints is key to improve modeling of the distribution of biodiversity in the past and future.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, City College of New York, New York, NY 10031; Department of Biology, Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY 10016; ivanprates@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Ivan
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-6314-8852
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Prates
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, City College of New York, New York, NY 10031; Department of Biology, Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY 10016;
authors.forename: Alexander T
authors.initials: AT
authors.lastname: Xue
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, City College of New York, New York, NY 10031; Cooperative Wildlife Research Laboratory, Department of Zoology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901;
authors.forename: Jason L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, City College of New York, New York, NY 10031; Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109;
authors.forename: Diego F
authors.initials: DF
authors.lastname: Alvarado-Serrano
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Zoologia, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, SP 05508-090, Brazil;
authors.forename: Miguel T
authors.initials: MT
authors.lastname: Rodrigues
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, City College of New York, New York, NY 10031; Department of Biology, Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY 10016; Division of Invertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY 10024.
authors.forename: Michael J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Hickerson
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, City College of New York, New York, NY 10031; Department of Biology, Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY 10016;
authors.forename: Ana C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Carnaval
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002980:Climate; D003710:Demography; D065928:Forests; D008116:Lizards / Q000235:genetics*; D010802:Phylogeny; D058974:Phylogeography; D020641:Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
keywords: Amazon Forest; Atlantic Forest; climate change; phylogeography; population genomics