Background: Gila topminnow (Poeciliopsis occidentalis occidentalis) was once highly abundant throughout the Lower Colorado River Basin of the southwestern United States. However, this Sonoran Desert endemic suffered extreme population declines over the past century because of habitat degradation and nonnative species introductions. Much of the prior conservation genetic work conducted on the species relied upon a small number of microsatellite loci; many exhibiting low variability in extant populations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSome of the most important insights into the ecological and evolutionary processes of diversification and speciation have come from studies of island adaptive radiations, yet relatively little research has examined how these radiations initiate. We suggest that Anolis sagrei is a candidate for understanding the origins of the Caribbean Anolis adaptive radiation and how a colonizing anole species begins to undergo allopatric diversification, phenotypic divergence and, potentially, speciation. We undertook a genomic and morphological analysis of representative populations across the entire native range of A.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: PCCA (phylogenetic canonical correlation analysis) is a new program for canonical correlation analysis of multivariate, continuously valued data from biological species. Canonical correlation analysis is a technique in which derived variables are obtained from two sets of original variables whereby the correlations between corresponding derived variables are maximized. It is a very useful multivariate statistical method for the calculation and analysis of correlations between character sets.
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