Historical biogeography of the Australian Eremean Avifauna

In cooperation with Leo Joseph (Australian National Wildlife Collection, Canberra)

Arid and semi-arid zones occupy much of Australia, west of the continent’s eastern seaboard. The approximately 220 bird species that comprise these zones’ avifauna are termed the Australian Eremean Avifauna (AEA). Within the AEA, some 80 species are old, autochthonous elements and many others are members of old, endemic families. Thus, most of the AEA is descended from ancestral lineages that evolved since the Tertiary. The critical implication of our current studies is that at least on the macrogeographic scale of the Australian continent, most of the AEA’s member species thus have a shared environmental history. This shared long-term environmental history provides a useful context in which to explore the use of molecular data in understanding the historical biogeography of AEA species. Of particular interest are widespread, co-distributed AEA species found across much of the continent as they have evolved a spectrum of geographical patterns of intraspecific differentiation in plumage and morphometrics.
We compare and contrast the population histories of these species from mitochondrial DNA sequences and AFLP data in order to study the role of historical and non-historical factors for understanding this variation.