Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Ecol Lett. 2013 Feb;16(2):175-82. doi: 10.1111/ele.12025. Epub 2012 Nov 9.
Investigating the properties of ecological landscapes that influence gene flow among populations can provide key insights into the earliest stages of biological divergence. Both ecological and geographical factors can reduce gene flow, which can lead to population divergence, but we know little of the relative strengths of these phenomena in nature. Here, we use a novel application of structural equation modelling to quantify the contributions of ecological and geographical isolation to spatial genetic divergence in 17 species of Anolis lizards. Our comparative analysis shows that although both processes contributed significantly, geographical isolation explained substantially more genetic divergence than ecological isolation (36.3 vs. 17.9% of variance respectively), suggesting that despite the proposed ubiquity of ecological divergence, non-ecological factors play the dominant role in the evolution of spatial genetic divergence.
研究影响种群间基因流动的生态景观特性，可以为生物分化的最初阶段提供重要的见解。生态和地理因素都会减少基因流动，从而导致种群分化，但我们对这些现象在自然界中的相对强度知之甚少。在这里，我们使用结构方程模型的一种新应用来量化生态隔离和地理隔离对 17 种蜥蜴的空间遗传分化的贡献。我们的比较分析表明，尽管这两个过程都有重要贡献，但地理隔离比生态隔离解释了更多的遗传分化（分别为方差的 36.3%和 17.9%），这表明尽管提出了生态隔离的普遍性，但非生态因素在空间遗传分化的进化中起着主导作用。
