
@article {149386,
	title = {Divergence and serial colonization shape genetic variation and define conservation units in Asian elephants.},
	journal = {Curr Biol},
	year = {2024},
	month = {2024 Sep 27},
	abstract = {<p>Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) are the largest extant terrestrial megaherbivores native to Asia, with 60\% of their wild population found in India. Despite ecological and cultural importance, their population genetic structure and diversity, demographic history, and ensuing implications for management/conservation remain understudied. We analyzed 34 whole genomes (between 11{\texttimes} and 32{\texttimes}) from most known elephant landscapes in India and identified five management/conservation units corresponding to elephants in Northern (Northwestern/Northeastern), Central, and three in Southern India. Our data reveal signatures of divergence and serial colonization and a potential dilution of genetic diversity from north to south of India. The northern populations diverged from others more than 70,000 years ago, have higher genetic diversity, and have low inbreeding (pi\&nbsp;= 0.0016\&nbsp;{\textpm} 0.0001; F\&nbsp;= 0.09\&nbsp;{\textpm} 0.03). Two of three populations in Southern India have low diversity and are inbred, with very low effective population sizes compared with census sizes (pi\&nbsp;= 0.0014\&nbsp;{\textpm} 0.00009 and 0.0015\&nbsp;{\textpm} 0.0001; F\&nbsp;= 0.25\&nbsp;{\textpm} 0.09 and 0.17\&nbsp;{\textpm} 0.02). Analyses of genetic load reveal the purging of potentially high-effect insertion/deletion (indel) deleterious alleles in the southern populations and a decreasing number of deleterious alleles from north to south in India. However, despite dilution and purging for the damaging mutation load in Southern India, the load that remains is homozygous. High homozygosity of deleterious alleles, coupled with low neutral genetic diversity, make southernmost populations high priority for conservation attention. Most surprisingly, our study suggests that patterns of genetic diversity and genetic load can correspond to genomic signatures of serial founding events, even in large, highly mobile, endangered mammals.</p>
},
	issn = {1879-0445},
	doi = {10.1016/j.cub.2024.08.062},
	author = {Khan, Anubhab and Sil, Maitreya and Thekaekara, Tarsh and Garg, Kritika M and Sinha, Ishani and Khurana, Rupsy and Sukumar, Raman and Ramakrishnan, Uma}
}
@article {92882,
	title = {Interactions between all pairs of neighboring trees in 16 forests worldwide reveal details of unique ecological processes in each forest, and provide windows into their evolutionary histories.},
	journal = {PLoS Comput Biol},
	volume = {17},
	year = {2021},
	month = {2021 Apr},
	pages = {e1008853},
	abstract = {<p>When Darwin visited the Galapagos archipelago, he observed that, in spite of the islands{\textquoteright} physical similarity, members of species that had dispersed to them recently were beginning to diverge from each other. He postulated that these divergences must have resulted primarily from interactions with sets of other species that had also diverged across these otherwise similar islands. By extrapolation, if Darwin is correct, such complex interactions must be driving species divergences across all ecosystems. However, many current general ecological theories that predict observed distributions of species in ecosystems do not take the details of between-species interactions into account. Here we quantify, in sixteen forest diversity plots (FDPs) worldwide, highly significant negative density-dependent (NDD) components of both conspecific and heterospecific between-tree interactions that affect the trees{\textquoteright} distributions, growth, recruitment, and mortality. These interactions decline smoothly in significance with increasing physical distance between trees. They also tend to decline in significance with increasing phylogenetic distance between the trees, but each FDP exhibits its own unique pattern of exceptions to this overall decline. Unique patterns of between-species interactions in ecosystems, of the general type that Darwin postulated, are likely to have contributed to the exceptions. We test the power of our null-model method by using a deliberately modified data set, and show that the method easily identifies the modifications. We examine how some of the exceptions, at the Wind River (USA) FDP, reveal new details of a known allelopathic effect of one of the Wind River gymnosperm species. Finally, we explore how similar analyses can be used to investigate details of many types of interactions in these complex ecosystems, and can provide clues to the evolution of these interactions.</p>
},
	issn = {1553-7358},
	doi = {10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008853},
	author = {Wills, Christopher and Wang, Bin and Fang, Shuai and Wang, Yunquan and Jin, Yi and Lutz, James and Thompson, Jill and Harms, Kyle E and Pulla, Sandeep and Pasion, Bonifacio and Germain, Sara and Liu, Heming and Smokey, Joseph and Su, Sheng-Hsin and Butt, Nathalie and Chu, Chengjin and Chuyong, George and Chang-Yang, Chia-Hao and Dattaraja, H S and Davies, Stuart and Ediriweera, Sisira and Esufali, Shameema and Fletcher, Christine Dawn and Gunatilleke, Nimal and Gunatilleke, Savi and Hsieh, Chang-Fu and He, Fangliang and Hubbell, Stephen and Hao, Zhanqing and Itoh, Akira and Kenfack, David and Li, Buhang and Li, Xiankun and Ma, Keping and Morecroft, Michael and Mi, Xiangcheng and Malhi, Yadvinder and Ong, Perry and Rodriguez, Lillian Jennifer and Suresh, H S and Sun, I Fang and Sukumar, Raman and Tan, Sylvester and Thomas, Duncan and Uriarte, Maria and Wang, Xihua and Wang, Xugao and Yao, T L and Zimmermann, Jess}
}
