Meeting Abstract
Urbanization is a major disturbance threatening habitats worldwide, yet there is limited information on how wildlife populations are responding to rapidly changing landscapes. When habitats are altered, persisting species can demonstrate physiological shifts in life history strategies due to novel challenges. Life history theory predicts phenotypic differences among populations to emerge from different selective pressures. Physiological differences in life history traits can thus arise from intraspecific genetic differentiation and environmental effects on gene expression. Emerging studies in side-blotched lizards Uta stansburiana suggest such selection potential through population-level physiological responses to urbanization, but the genetic signatures of recent evolutionary change remain largely unexplored. We hypothesized that local adaptation to urbanization has contributed to life history divergence between populations of side-blotched lizards. By assessing genetic time-series data, we inferred evolutionary trajectories for ecological specialization in urban and rural lizard populations. Such analysis included single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) generated by double digestive RAD sequencing. We calculated average allele frequency changes across SNPs to infer effective population size and estimate variable selection across the genome. This approach revealed the degree to which standing genetic variation among heterogeneous environments is likely to enable physiological shifts in life history traits.
