Journal
MOLECULAR ECOLOGY
Volume 26, Issue 19, Pages 5223-5244Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/mec.14260
Keywords
climatic refugia; ecological niche modelling; Hyperolius; land-bridge island; lineage divergence; riverine barriers
Funding
- Explorer's Club
- American Philosophical Society
- Sigma Xi
- Society of Systematic Biologists
- Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies
- Cornell Graduate School
- Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
- EEB Paul P. Feeny Fund
- EEB Paul Graduate Fellowship
- University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship
- Museum of Comparative Zoology Herpetology Division at Harvard University
- BIOTA projects of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research
- BIOTA Germany [01 LC 0017, 01 LC 0025]
- US National Science Foundation [DEB-1309171, DEB-1202609, DEB-1145459]
- National Geographic Society [8556-08, 8868-10]
- California Academy of Sciences
- Percy Sladen Memorial Fund
- IUCN/SSC Amphibian Specialist Group
- Department of Biology at Villanova University
- University of Texas at El Paso
- Czech Science Foundation [15-13415Y]
- Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic [DKRVO 2017/15]
- National Museum Grant [00023272]
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Organismal traits interact with environmental variation to mediate how species respond to shared landscapes. Thus, differences in traits related to dispersal ability or physiological tolerance may result in phylogeographic discordance among co-distributed taxa, even when they are responding to common barriers. We quantified climatic suitability and stability, and phylogeographic divergence within three reed frog species complexes across the Guineo-Congolian forests and Gulf of Guinea archipelago of Central Africa to investigate how they responded to a shared climatic and geological history. Our species-specific estimates of climatic suitability through time are consistent with temporal and spatial heterogeneity in diversification among the species complexes, indicating that differences in ecological breadth may partly explain these idiosyncratic patterns. Likewise, we demonstrated that fluctuating sea levels periodically exposed a land bridge connecting Bioko Island with the mainland Guineo-Congolian forest and that habitats across the exposed land bridge likely enabled dispersal in some species, but not in others. We did not find evidence that rivers are biogeographic barriers across any of the species complexes. Despite marked differences in the geographic extent of stable climates and temporal estimates of divergence among the species complexes, we recovered a shared pattern of intermittent climatic suitability with recent population connectivity and demographic expansion across the Congo Basin. This pattern supports the hypothesis that genetic exchange across the Congo Basin during humid periods, followed by vicariance during arid periods, has shaped regional diversity. Finally, we identified many distinct lineages among our focal taxa, some of which may reflect incipient or unrecognized species.
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