Doctoral Dissertation Research: Effects of anthropogenic habitat fragmentation on primate movement patterns and dispersal

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Over the past several thousand years, human expansion into tropical forests and the associated transformation of landscapes into patchworks of forested, agricultural, and urban habitats has had a negative impact on primate populations and led to increases in direct conflict between humans and wild, nonhuman primates. However, despite this long history of contact, the influence of human (anthropogenic) factors on primate evolutionary trajectories is not fully understood. This project will examine how anthropogenically-fragmented landscapes affect gene flow, genetic structure, and functional connectivity among wild populations of the silvery-brown tamarin, a charismatic and endangered primate from the Rio Magdalena valley in northern Colombia. The study will strengthen long-term international collaborations between US and Colombian researchers and help bolster relationships between researchers, the local community, and the state environmental corporation, which will further support the conservation of this endangered primate. It will also provide research, training, and mentorship opportunities for a female graduate student and undergraduates, thereby promoting and engaging greater participation of underrepresented constituencies in STEM disciplines. Tamarins are small-bodied monkeys with relatively short generation times, and across their geographic range they are subject to ongoing anthropogenic landscape changes. At the same time, they show a high degree of mobility and ability to survive in human-modified habitats, resulting in their sharing space with humans and making tamarins ideal models for understanding the evolutionary consequences of habitat fragmentation. Using next-generation genomic techniques, this project will type tens of thousands of markers from across the nuclear genome for dozens of individual tamarins to determine how natural and anthropogenic factors together shape patterns of genetic variation at the landscape level. This will be one of the first genomic studies of population structure in wild primates and one of the first to explicitly examine the effects of human-induced habitat change. The genetic data and results will be disseminated through scientific journals and presentations and will be given to environmental agencies for future implementation of conservation actions.