Biogeography

A tale of two fishes: how standing genetic diversity influences species responses to environmental change

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How can species respond to environmental change?

If you’re a somewhat avid (or even cursory) reader of The G-CAT, you may remember my wrap-up post at the conclusion of my PhD in 2020 which described the various chapters of my thesis. Well, I’m pleased to announce that data chapter 2 of that thesis – on the comparative phylogeography of two threatened Australian freshwater fishes – has just been published in the journal BMC Ecology and Evolution. It’s a pretty complex paper which tackles genetic diversity, phylogenetics, demographic history, species distribution models and how these interact together to understand the evolutionary history of these species in a comparative framework. Feel free to check it out (it’s open access and free to read!) here.

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Shifting lakes, coastlines and mountains: how millions of years of environmental changes shaped the evolution of a little fish

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The roles of aridification and sea level changes in the diversification and persistence of freshwater fish lineages

The process of publishing science is a lengthy one – there are many rounds of revisions, assessments, and review required before a paper can be published. With that, I’m very proud to announce that the first paper from my PhD has recently been published in the journal Molecular Ecology. This paper is a collection of a lot of complex analyses, and addressing some relatively complicated biogeographical questions, so I’ve decided to provide a simplified summary here.

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Dr. G-CAT

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Overview of 2020

As you may have gathered, The G-CAT has been significantly less active in this our most Cursed year. There are a number of reasons for that – not just the overall disaster that has been world events – including the fact that this was the last year of my PhD. I’m delighted to announce that now, after ~3.5 years of hard work, I am officially Dr. Buckley (not Dr. G-CAT, as I may have led you to believe)!

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In accordance with evolution: discordance and concordance in phylogeography

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The nature of phylogeography

Studying the interaction of environmental changes and species evolution is a critical component for predicting how species might – or might not – respond to new environmental stressors induced by climate change. We can study this at a variety of different levels and using many different data types, ranging from ‘traditional’ ecological studies which correlate phenotypic changes and environment to more narrower studies of ecological genetics and how allelic frequencies change in association with environmental gradients.

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From coast to continent: how our freshwater biota travelled across the landscape

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The Australian aquascape

To anyone who has lived within Australia for a given period time, and likely many from across the globe, it is clear that water is a precious resource. Rainfall across much of the continent is patchy and variable, and the availability of water is a critical aspect in the distribution, survival and evolution of many Australian species. Expectedly, these aspects play an even bigger role for those taxonomic groups that heavily rely on the presence of water; freshwater-dependent taxa such as fish, amphibians or aquatic invertebrates show a keen evolutionary relationship with water across the landscape.

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