Meeting Abstract
Montane environments provide particularly good settings in which to investigate factors that generate and maintain biodiversity. Their landscapes are heterogeneous, containing non-uniform terrain and a mosaic of different habitat types. Clines in elevation, temperature, season length, moisture regimes, and other variables can create complex patterns of both adaptive and neutral genetic variation on the landscape. We investigate these patterns in the bumble bee Bombus vosnesenskii within the Sierra-Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges of California, Oregon, and Washington. Bumble bees interact with the environment in numerous ways that are affected by the unique environmental qualities in montane systems, including spatial variation in floral resources, temperature, air density, precipitation, and seasonality. We use single nucleotide polymorphism data generated by high-throughput RADtag sequencing to examine genomic patterns of adaptation and demography across this complex landscape. Results will have implications for our understanding of interactions between gene flow and local adaptation in genomic divergence in heterogeneous landscapes.
