Environmental selection, rather than neutral processes, best explain regional patterns of diversity in a tropical rainforest fish.

ABSTRACT: To conserve the high functional and genetic variation in hotspots such as tropical rainforests, it is essential to understand the forces driving and maintaining biodiversity. We asked to what extent environmental gradients and terrain structure affect morphological and genomic variation across the wet tropical distribution of an Australian rainbowfish, Melanotaenia splendida splendida. We used an integrative riverscape genomics and morphometrics framework to assess the influence of these factors on both putative adaptive and non-adaptive spatial divergence. We found that neutral genetic population structure was largely explainable by restricted gene flow among drainages. However, environmental associations revealed that ecological variables had a similar power to explain overall genetic va

SUBMITTER: Gates K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10238429 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature