Continental phylogeography of an ecologically and morphologically diverse Neotropical songbird, Zonotrichia capensis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The Neotropics are exceptionally diverse, containing roughly one third of all extant bird species on Earth. This remarkable species richness is thought to be a consequence of processes associated with both Andean orogenesis throughout the Tertiary, and climatic fluctuations during the Quaternary. Phylogeographic studies allow insights into how such events might have influenced evolutionary trajectories of species and ultimately contribute to a better understanding of speciation. Studies on continentally distributed species are of particular interest because different populations of such taxa may show genetic signatures of events that impacted the continent-wide biota. Here we evaluate the genealogical history of one of the world's most broadly-distributed and polytypic passerines, the rufous-collared sparrow (Zonotrichia capensis). RESULTS: We obtained control region DNA sequences from 92 Zonotrichia capensis individuals sampled across the species' range (Central and South America). Six additional molecular markers, both nuclear and mitochondrial, were sequenced for a subset of individuals with divergent control region haplotypes. Median-joining network analysis, and Bayesian and maximum parsimony phylogenetic analyses all recovered three lineages: one spanning Middle America, the Dominican Republic, and north-western South America; one encompassing the Dominican Republic, Roraima (Venezuela) and La Paz (Bolivia) south to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina; and a third, including eastern Argentina and Brazil. Phylogenetic analyses suggest that the Middle American/north-western South American clade is sister to the remaining two. Bayesian and maximum likelihood coalescent simulations used to study lineage demographic history, diversification times, migration rates and population expansion together suggested that diversification of the three lineages occurred rapidly during the Pleistocene, with negligible gene flow, leaving genetic signatures of population expansions. CONCLUSIONS: The Pleistocene history of the rufous-collared sparrow involved extensive range expansion from a probable Central American origin. Its remarkable morphological and behavioral diversity probably represents recent responses to local conditions overlying deeper patterns of lineage diversity, which are themselves produced by isolation and the history of colonization of South America.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".