Comparative phylogeography informs community structure and assembly during and after Pleistocene Lake Bonneville

Abstract

Dispersal is one of the major processes controlling both genetic diversity and species diversity and is frequently studied in both phylogeography and community ecology. As such, integrating these fields to uncover how both historical and contemporary dispersal have affected local community structure can provide greater insights into community assembly. We used comparative phylogeography to determine if freshwater fish species in the Bonneville Basin show evidence of geologically recent dispersal and gene flow, which would probably have occurred when the basin was inundated by Lake Bonneville in the late Pleistocene. We then used museum records to uncover patterns of contemporary community structure and relate them to the results of the phylogeographical analyses. We found evidence for late Pleistocene dispersal throughout the Bonneville Basin in most of the fish species studied, which would have homogenized ancient communities. However, modern communities show evidence of non-random community structure and dispersal limitation between major sub-basins and habitats. Together, these results suggest that the Bonneville Basin fish fauna assembled due to a combination of historical dispersal and contemporary habitat filtering and extinction dynamics following isolation. Further work should continue to combine different data types to achieve more accurate inferences regarding contemporary community assembly.