International Research Fellowship Program: Modeling Alpine Population Histories with Approximate Bayesian Computation

Schoville Sean D, Jamul CA

Investigators

Abstract

The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Sean D. Schoville to work with Dr. Olivier Francois at Grenoble Institute of Technology in France. Glacial cycles have caused rapid, regional reorganization of alpine ecosystems at repeated intervals in the last 2.7 million years. These ecosystems provide a naturally replicated model system to study how recent spatial and temporal environmental change can influence processes of species formation and community assembly. At present, the utilization of genetic data to make inferences about the spatial and temporal history of populations is largely restricted to a limited set of analytical models. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a methodological approach that can be used to expand the set of population models considered and provide quantitative criteria to statistically discriminate between these alternative models. This research project utilizes ABC methodology to examine patterns of demographic change and the timing of divergence in alpine populations, across many co-occurring species in three geographically independent alpine ecosystems. This comparison examines whether spatial, temporal and demographic change in alpine species follows predicable patterns across the Northern Hemisphere. Training objectives of this research include statistical analysis of population genetic data, bioinformatics, and computational biology. On the applied side, this research provides an important advance in the field of biogeography by implementing objective, statistical criteria when discriminating between alternative evolutionary hypotheses and allowing broad scale comparisons to be built on quantitative methods. Climate change and landscape modification are the primary environmental agents that are shared in the evolutionary history of alpine species. Demonstrating the importance of these environmental factors in shaping the evolution of co-distributed species will have implications for the effects of ongoing climate changes and the strategies needed to manage threatened alpine species both for short-term ecological viability and long-term evolutionary potential. This research develops international collaborative projects on alpine biodiversity across the Northern Hemisphere, focusing on evolutionary history, ecosystem organization and conservation.