Phylogeographic studies have long focused on striking biogeographic barriers, and comparative phylogeography often looks for shared divergence across such barriers as evidence of shared responses to similar environments across taxa. However, in addition to such barriers, geographic distances and local adaptation to environmental heterogeneity may shape genetic divergence. In their recent Molecular Ecology paper, Myers and colleagues collect genomic data from 13 co-distributed species of snakes from Southwestern North America and evaluate the relative importance of biogeographic barriers, geographic distance, and environmental heterogeneity in structuring genetic divergence. Much of the previous phylogeographic work in this region has focused on divergence across a prominent biogeographic barrier: the Cochise Filter Barrier (CFB), which separates the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts, and divergence across this barrier has been suggested to be an important factor driving divergence in snakes from the region. Though they expected to find a prominent role of this barrier, instead, Myers and colleagues find strong support for geographic distance and environmental heterogeneity as important factors structuring genetic divergence, but less support for biogeographic barriers. Further, they find that different variables contribute most to divergence across the 13 taxa studied, highlighting the importance of species-specific responses to environmental variation. Read the full article here, and read below for a behind-the-scenes interview with lead author Edward Myers.

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What led to your interest in this topic / what was the motivation for this study? 
As a research team we have a general interest in what factors are promoting population genetic differentiation and whether codistributed species have similar evolutionary histories in response to shared environmental changes over time. Specifically, in this system where there is a well known biogeographic barrier (Cochise Filter Barrier; CFB), we were interested in whether entire assemblages of taxa show similar population structure. Initially the motivation for this study was to assess the degree of co-divergence across the CFB, however, as we analyzed these data it became clear that we needed to incorporate spatial and environmental data to understand population divergence. This study also allowed me spend a significant amount of time in the field collecting tissue samples from snakes!

What difficulties did you run into along the way? 
One of the biggest difficulties with this study was handling and analyzing all the generated data. We had almost 400 samples sequenced for radseq, so processing and analyzing these data took a significant amount of computational time. Also, one difficulty was the logistics of collecting fresh tissue samples for all of these species across the southwestern US and northern Mexico, but issues like this are easily over come by collaborating.

What is the biggest or most surprising finding from this study? 
The biggest surprise from this study is that patterns of isolation-by-distance and isolation-by-environment are more important in explaining population genetic differentiation than a commonly cited biogeographic barrier. This result really stresses the importance of incorporating spatial analyses when analyzing phylogeographic data because aspatial analyses may result in spurious results of population structure and mislead our ideas of what is driving population divergence and speciation.

Moving forward, what are the next steps for this research? 
Moving forward I plan to generate whole genome sequence data for species within this system to understand what loci may be under selection in response to environmental heterogeneity. Given the strong signature of IBE I expect to find patterns of strong selection along transects of temperature and precipitation across the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts. Further, I am interested in how other regions globally that have been cited as important biogeographic barriers in phylogeographic studies might also be strongly influenced by patterns of IBD and IBE, and not vicariant barriers.

What would your message be for students about to start their first research projects in this topic? 
There is so much great work published in the field of landscape genetics and comparative phylogeography and I would suggest that students start by combing through that work first. But as general advice I would suggest that students really explore their data in a meaningful way and spend some time thinking about what factors could be responsible for similar patterns observed in a genomic data set (e.g., IBD vs vicariance or selection vs historical demography).

What have you learned about science over the course of this project? 
I have really learned that genomic data should be carefully analyzed as to not be influenced by preconceived ideas of the system that you might be working within. Also, I think that this is becoming more and more true, but you have to collaborate in order to do great science.

Describe the significance of this research for the general scientific community in one sentence.
This work demonstrates that codistributed species do not have shared evolutionary histories, and that they do not respond to the same landscape and shared environment in similar ways.

Describe the significance of this research for your scientific community in one sentence.
Our work shows that simple patterns of isolation-by-distance and isolation-by-environment have contributed to population genetic differentiation more so than commonly cited biogeographic barriers.

Full article: Myers EA, Xue AT, Gehara M, et al.Environmental heterogeneity and not vicariant biogeographic barriers generate community‐wide population structure in desert‐adapted snakes. Mol Ecol. 2019;28:4535–4548. https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.15182