Fluctuating fire regimes and their historical effects on genetic variation in an endangered shrubland specialist.

ABSTRACT: The Pleistocene was characterized by worldwide shifts in community compositions. Some of these shifts were a result of changes in fire regimes, which influenced the distribution of species belonging to fire-dependent communities. We studied an endangered juniper-oak shrubland specialist, the black-capped vireo (Vireo atricapilla). This species was locally extirpated in parts of Texas and Oklahoma by the end of the 1980s as a result of habitat change and loss, predation, brood parasitism, and anthropogenic fire suppression. We sequenced multiple nuclear loci and used coalescence methods to obtain a deeper understanding of historical population trends than that typically available from microsatellites or mtDNA. We compared our estimated population history, a long-term history of the fire reg

SUBMITTER: Vazquez-Miranda H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4813106 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature