Biology subjects

Tarroso, P.

Publications and source records attributed to Tarroso, P..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Overcoming data limitations in macrogenetics: assessing and accounting for spatial heterogeneity in sequence data

At large scales, our ability to compare genetic diversity across species is often challenged by the difficulty of extracting range-wide sequence data from online databases. Using mitochondrial DNA from amphibians and reptiles spanning across six regions: Brazilian Atlantic Forest, Iberian Peninsula, northwestern Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Madagascar and Australian Monsoonal Tropics, we develop and implement a framework to overcome common limitations in macrogenetics. We compiled and manually curated a spatially explicit genetic dataset from public repositories, quantified the spatial representativeness of genetic sampling across species' ranges and developed a novel interpolation framework to estimate and map species-specific patterns of intraspecific genetic diversity (ISD) while accounting for heterogeneous spatial sampling. We estimated mean nucleotide diversity across species to produce regional maps for each genetic marker. Our final dataset comprised 182 amphibian and 239 reptile species, encompassing 184 genera from 54 families. Range representativeness of genetic sampling was generally high, despite some variation across study regions. Spatial patterns of ISD revealed geographic heterogeneity, and were consistent across the best-sampled mitochondrial markers. By combining automated and manual georeferencing, quantifying range representativeness, and accounting for bias in spatial interpolations, our pipeline is marker-agnostic and directly applicable to nuclear and genomic data as they become available.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2023

The origin of a mountain biota: hyper-aridity shaped reptile diversity in an Arabian biodiversity hotspot

Advances in genomics have greatly enhanced our understanding of mountain biodiversity, providing new insights into the complex and dynamic mechanisms that drive the formation of mountain biotas. These include from broad biogeographic patterns, to population dynamics and adaptations to these environments. However, significant challenges remain in integrating these large-scale and fine-scale findings to develop a comprehensive understanding of mountain biodiversity. One significant challenge is the lack of genomic data, particularly in historically understudied arid regions where reptiles are a particularly diverse vertebrate group. We generated de novo genome-wide SNP data for more than 600 specimens and integrated state-of-the-art biogeographic analyses at the community, species and population level. We, thus, provide for the first time, a holistic integration of how a whole endemic reptile community has originated, diversified and dispersed through a mountain range. Our results show that reptiles independently colonized the Hajar Mountains of eastern Arabia 11 times. After colonization, species delimitation methods suggest high levels of within-mountain diversification, supporting up to 49 putative species. This diversity is strongly structured following local topography, with the highest peaks acting as a broad barrier to gene flow among the entire community. Surprisingly, orogenic events do not seem to rise as key drivers of the biogeographic history of reptiles in this system. However, paleoclimate seems to have had a major role in this community assemblage. We observe an increase of vicariant events from Late Pliocene onwards, coinciding with an unstable climatic period of rapid shifts between hyper-arid to semiarid conditions that led to the ongoing desertification of Arabia. We conclude that paleoclimate, and particularly extreme aridification, acted as a main driver of diversification in arid mountain systems which is tangled with the generation of highly adapted endemicity. Our study provides a valuable contribution to understanding the evolution of mountain biodiversity and the role of environmental factors in shaping the distribution and diversity of reptiles in arid regions.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2021

Desert lizard diversity worldwide: effects of environment, time, and evolutionary rate

AimBiodiversity is not uniformly distributed across the Earths surface, even among physiographically comparable biomes in different biogeographic regions. For lizards, the worlds large desert regions are characterized by extreme heterogeneity in species richness, spanning some of the most species-rich (arid Australia) and species-poor (central Asia) biomes overall. Regional differences in species diversity may arise as a consequence of the interplay of several factors (e.g., evolutionary time, diversification rate, environment), but their relative importance for biogeographic patterns remains poorly known. Here we use distributional and phylogenetic data to assess the evolutionary and ecological drivers of large-scale variation in desert lizard diversity. LocationDeserts worldwide. Major taxa studiedLizards (non-snake squamates). MethodsWe specifically test whether diversity patterns are best explained by differences in the ages of arid-adapted lineages (evolutionary time hypothesis), by regional variation in speciation rate, by geographic area of the arid systems, and by spatial variation related to environment (climate, topography, and productivity). ResultsWe found no effect of recent speciation rate and geographic area on differences in desert lizard diversity. We demonstrate that the extreme species richness of the Australian deserts cannot be explained by greater evolutionary time, because species began accumulating more recently there than in more species-poor arid regions. We found limited support for relationships between regional lizard richness and environmental variables, but these effects were inconsistent across deserts, showing a differential role of the environment in shaping the lizard diversity in different arid regions. Main conclusionsOur results provide evidence against several classic hypotheses for interregional variation in species richness, but also highlight the complexity of processes underlying vertebrate community richness in the worlds great arid systems.

evolutionary biology↗