Meeting Abstract
The Upper and Lower Guinean Forests host the highest levels of biodiversity on the African continent. There is increasing support for the role that historical forest refugia play in generating and maintaining diversity in the Afrotropics. The Forest Refuge Hypothesis (FRH) posits that repeated forest contraction and expansion events in the tropics have driven allopatric speciation, effectively serving as “species-pumps.” We focus on multiple species of the genus Amnirana that are co-distributed across several historical forest refugia in the Upper and Lower Guinean Forest Zones. Preliminary multi-locus sequence data supports that there are high levels of cryptic diversity within this genus, much of which is associated with predicted forest refugia within the Guinean forests of West and Central Africa. However, since this support is only correlative we wanted to more stringently test the FRH using historical population demographics of several co-distributed members of Amnirana. Taking a comparative phylogeographic approach we collected ddRADseq data for 254 individuals across 19 countries. We predict that populations at forest refugia will have a signal of population stability and that between refugia populations will have signals of expansion. Taking a comparative phylogeographic approach is powerful for teasing apart shared historical processes from idiosyncratic responses of individual species.
