Data from: Museum DNA reveals the demographic history of the endangered Seychelles warbler

  • Lewis Spurgin (Creator)
  • David J Wright (Creator)
  • Marco van der Velde (Creator)
  • Nigel J. Collar (Creator)
  • Jan Komdeur (Creator)
  • Terry A. Burke (Creator)
  • David S. Richardson (Creator)

Dataset

Description

The importance of evolutionary conservation – how understanding evolutionary forces can help guide conservation decisions – is widely recognized. However, the historical demography of many endangered species is unknown, despite the fact that this can have important implications for contemporary ecological processes and for extinction risk. Here, we reconstruct the population history of the Seychelles warbler (Acrocephalus sechellensis) – an ecological model species. By the 1960s, this species was on the brink of extinction, but its previous history is unknown. We used DNA samples from contemporary and museum specimens spanning 140 years to reconstruct bottleneck history. We found a 25% reduction in genetic diversity between museum and contemporary populations, and strong genetic structure. Simulations indicate that the Seychelles warbler was bottlenecked from a large population, with an ancestral Ne of several thousands falling to <50 within the last century. Such a rapid decline, due to anthropogenic factors, has important implications for extinction risk in the Seychelles warbler, and our results will inform conservation practices. Reconstructing the population history of this species also allows us to better understand patterns of genetic diversity, inbreeding and promiscuity in the contemporary populations. Our approaches can be applied across species to test ecological hypotheses and inform conservation.

The data package contains one dataset:
- This folder contains data and R scripts for the paper Spurgin et al. (2014) 'Museum DNA reveals the demographic history of the endangered Seychelles warbler' There are 2 files in the 'Data' folder - raw microsatellite genotypes for each individual in genepop format, and heterozygosity for each locus and population in csv format.
Datum van beschikbaarheid8-jul.-2014
UitgeverUniversity of Groningen
Geografische dekkingSeychelles

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