Temperate origins of long-distance seasonal migration in New World songbirds.

ABSTRACT: Migratory species exhibit seasonal variation in their geographic ranges, often inhabiting geographically and ecologically distinct breeding and nonbreeding areas. The complicated geography of seasonal migration has long posed a challenge for inferring the geographic origins of migratory species as well as evolutionary sequences of change in migratory behavior. To address this challenge, we developed a phylogenetic model of the joint evolution of breeding and nonbreeding (winter) ranges and applied it to the inference of biogeographic history in the emberizoid passerine birds. We found that seasonal migration between breeding ranges in North America and winter ranges in the Neotropics evolved primarily via shifts of winter ranges toward the tropics from ancestral ranges in North America. Th

SUBMITTER: Winger BM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4143041 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature