A Phylogenetic Perspective on Elevational Species Richness Patterns in Middle American Treefrogs: Why So Few Species in Lowland Tropical Rainforests?

Abstract

Differences in species richness at different elevations are widespread and important for conservation, but the causes of these patterns remain poorly understood. Here, we use a phylogenetic perspective to address the evolutionary and biogeographic processes that underlie elevational diversity patterns within a region. We focus on a diverse but well-studied fauna of tropical amphibians,

Amphibians crossing the Bering Land Bridge: Evidence from holarctic treefrogs (Hyla, Hylidae, Anura)

“…We can confirm monophyly of the genus Hyla as retrieved in several previous studies (Faivovich et al, 2005;Smith et al, 2005Smith et al, , 2007Wiens et al, 2005Wiens et al, , 2006Wiens et al, , 2010Hua et al, 2009). Differences from the study of Hua et al (2009) concern monophyly of the cinerea-and versicolor-groups as well as the phylogenetic relationships between these and the japonica-group.…”

“…16 Mya) fossil of Acris barbouri that was unearthed in North America, and which is probably the sister group of extant Acris species (Holman, 2003). As the genus Acris is in all previous phylogenies retrieved as the sister group of the genus Pseudacris (Smith et al, 2005(Smith et al, , 2007Wiens et al, 2006Wiens et al, , 2010, we set the minimum age for the divergence of Acris and Pseudacris to 16 Mya (5-95% interquantile range 19-16 Mya). (B) Fossil H. miofloridana was also described from Miocene Hemingfordian sediments in North America (20-16 Mya), which is supposed to be a close relative of extant H. gratiosa (Holman, 2003).…”

“…The phylogenetic affinity of fossil Hyla sp. unearthed in Europe (Austria) remains doubtful (Smith et al, 2007). This fossil was thus not used as a calibration point.…”

“…Nearctic and Palearctic species separate at the root of the genus, except for some species from northeastern Asia (H. japonica, H. immaculata) that nest phylogenetically between Nearctic species of Hyla, implying that Eurasian Hyla originated from two independent dispersal events from the Nearctic (Faivovich et al, 2005;Hua et al, 2009;Lemmon et al, 2007;Smith et al, 2005Smith et al, , 2007.…”

Diversification patterns in the North Andean Block: a perspective from biogeographical hypotheses

“…Chazot et al 2016 proposed a framework of biogeographic scenarios containing four main evolutionary mechanisms (speciation, extinction, older colonisation times, and migration) to investigate variation in diversity between Andean and non-Andean regions using the subtribe Godyridina. Each mechanism has been the support for the cradle (Fjeldså, 1994;Hutter et al, 2013), museum (Stebbins, 1974;Smith et al, 2007), timefor-speciation (Stephens and Wiens, 2002) and species-attractor (Beckman and Witt, 2015) hypotheses. However, there are still not studies with this framework assessing We assessed four hypotheses to identify the pattern(s) of diversification occurring in the NAB.…”