Quaternary climate fluctuations restructured biodiversity across North American high latitudes through repeated episodes of range contraction, population isolation and divergence, and subsequent expansion. Identifying how species responded to changing environmental conditions not only allows us to explore the mode and tempo of evolution in northern taxa, but also provides a basis for forecasting future biotic response across the highly variable topography of western North America. Using a multilocus approach under a Bayesian coalescent framework, we investigated the phylogeography of a wide‐ranging mammal, the long‐tailed vole,
Ecologists and fisheries managers are interested in monitoring economically important marine fish species and using this data to inform management strategies. Determining environmental factors that best predict changes in these populations, particularly under rapid climate change, are a priority. I illustrate the application of the least squares-based spline estimation and group LASSO (LSSGLASSO) procedure for selection of coefficient functions in single index varying coefficient models (SIVCMs) on an ecological data set that includes spatiotemporal environmental covariates suspected to play a role in the catches and weights of six groundfish species. Temporal trends in variable selection were apparent, though the selection of variables was largely unrelated to common North Pacific climate indices. These results indicate that the strength of an environmental variable’s effect on a groundfish population may change over time, and not necessarily in-step with known low-frequency patterns of ocean-climate variability commonly attributable to large-scale regime shifts in the North Pacific. My application of the LSSGLASSO procedure for SIVCMs to deep water species using environmental data from various sources illustrates how variable selection with a flexible model structure can produce informative inference for remote and hard-to-reach animal populations.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10227418
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Scientific Reports
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2045-2322
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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