Population genomics and historical demography of Atlantic Forest birds: a hypothesis test of regugia and the role of altitudinal distribution in phylogeography

Abstract

The Atlantic Forest holds hundreds of endemic species of vertebrates, which offers great opportunities for hypothesis test in evolutionary biology. The reguia hypothesis postulates that lineage diversification in the Neotropics occurred by the expansion and retraction of forests in response to climatic variation and is one of the possible explanations to the diversity in Atlantic Forest. Empirical studies accumulated so far show discordant patterns between sympatric species and suggest that specific ecological attributes may influence in the type of response to the same historical process. Futhermore, the discordance between studies may also be related to the lack of statistical power and stocatical erros in the inferences. Based on 14 co-distribuited species - differing in their altitudinal distributions - and one of the biggest datasets ever used in a Atlantic Forest Study (2500 loci), we therefore aim to test the following hypothesis: 1) forest birds species populations in Atlantic Forest were affected by recent climatic fluctuations, and 2) the altitudinal distribution is a good predictor of the kind of response to a same climatic event. The results obtained will be important not only for a better understanding of the historical processes in the bioma, but also to predict the potential future impacts of climate change in the Atlantic Forest. (AU)