Phylogeography and Genetic Structure in the California Giant Salamander (Dicamptodon ensatus): Impacts of current and historic landscape features.

The California Floristic Province contains numerous ecological regions and a complex geological and geographical history that make it one of the worlds biodiversity hotspots. A number of wide-ranging taxa span across these regions and show complex patterns of dispersal, vicariance and lineage diversification, making localized small ranged species with lower levels of vagility essential to understanding the overall region. Here, we investigate the biogeography and population structure of the California Giant Salamander (Dicamptodon ensatus) (Eschscholtz 1833), an endemic species localized to a narrow coastal region between two areas of biological significance in the California Floristic Province, the North Coast Divide and Monterey Bay.

Phylogenetic relationships and divergence dating in the Glass Lizards (Anguinae).

The Glass Lizards are a subfamily (Anguinae) of Anguid Lizards with an elongated limbless body plan that occur throughout the Northern Hemisphere primarily in North America, Europe, and Asia, but also have a presence in North Africa and Indonesia. We used twenty-five nuclear loci (15,191 bp) and 2090 bp of the mtDNA genome to generate a phylogeny containing all known species groups to explore species relationships within the group as well as divergence dating. We also examined the group in the context of a coalescent species tree analysis and species delimitation.

Phylogeography in Response to Reproductive Strategies and Ecogeographic Isolation in Ant Species on Madagascar: Genus Mystrium (Formicidae: Amblyoponinae).

The bulk of models used to understand the species diversification on Madagascar have been constructed using vertebrate taxa. It is not clear how these models affect less vagile species that may interact at a variety of spatial scales. Several studies on vertebrates have divided Madagascar into east-west bioclimatic regions, suggesting there is a fundamental division between eastern wet-adapted and western dry-adapted taxa.

Molecular systematics of basal subfamilies of ants using 28S rRNA (Hymenoptera: Formicidae).

For many years, the ant subfamily Ponerinae was hypothesized to contain the basal (early branching) lineages of ants. Recently the Ponerinae were reclassified into six poneromorph subfamilies based on morphological analysis. We evaluate this new poneromorph classification using 1240 base pairs of DNA sequence data obtained from 28S rRNA gene sequences of 68 terminal taxa.

Effects of Holocene climate change on the historical demography of migrating sharp-shinned hawks (Accipiter striatus velox) in North America.

DNA sequences of the mitochondrial control region were analysed from 298 individual sharp-shinned hawks (Accipiter striatus velox) sampled at 12 different migration study sites across North America. The control region proved to be an appropriate genetic marker for identification of continental-scale population genetic structure and for determining the historical demography of population units. These data suggest that sharp-shinned hawks sampled at migration sites in North America are divided into distinct eastern and western groups.