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Climatic and geographic effects on the spatial genetic pattern of a landbird species (Alectoris rufa) on the Iberian Peninsula

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Population Ecology

Abstract

Understanding the spatial pattern of genetic diversity may be pivotal to adaptive conservation management of a given taxon. The red-legged partridge (Alectoris rufa, Linnaeus 1758) is naturally widely distributed from the Mediterranean to humid temperate zones. According to a recent study, the genetic structure of this species comprises five clusters, three of which are in the Iberian Peninsula (glacial refugia). Partridge demographic expansion events and climatic shifts during Pleistocene glaciations have been used to test the hypotheses concerning Iberian red-legged partridge distribution. We tested the existence of climatic and geographic relationships on genetic diversity/distances. We employed markers from two different genetic systems, such as part of the mitochondrial DNA control region (n = 113) and 20 species-specific microsatellite DNA loci (n = 377), including climatic and geographic factors from the 14 Iberian localities where A. rufa populations were sampled. Our results showed a mitochondrial genetic diversity pattern associated with a thermic gradient, and a decrease of genetic diversity in peripheral populations that concurred with the ‘abundant centre’ hypothesis. Overall, current climatic variables reliably described genetic variation and differentiation in the red-legged partridge, which may be a result of local species adaptation.

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Acknowledgments

Throughout the course of this study, M.E.F. was supported by Pre-Doctoral Fellowships from the Junta de Comunidades de Castilla La Mancha and the European Social Fund; J.A.B.-A. was supported by Fundaçao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia with a Post-Doctoral Fellowship (SFRH/BPD/65464/2009). We are grateful to the Asociación de Cotos de Caza de Álava, Francisco Buenestado, Nuno Ferrand, Paulo Alves, Michel Vallance (Office National de la Chasse et de la Faune Sauvage), and Guillaume Queney (ANTAGENE) for their invaluable help with sample collection. We would also like to thank Inés Sánchez Sánchez-Barbudo, Pedro J. Gómez de Nova and Rafael Villafuerte for their technical and logistical support, and to the three anonymous reviewers who provided useful comments and suggestions that improved the manuscript.

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  1. Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos, IREC (CSIC, UCLM, JCCM), Ronda de Toledo s/n, 13005, Ciudad Real, Spain

    María Ester Ferrero, Jose Antonio Blanco-Aguiar & José Antonio Dávila

  2. InBio Laboratório Associado, CIBIO, Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos, Universidade do Porto, Campus Agrário de Vairão, 4485-661, Vairão, Portugal

    Jose Antonio Blanco-Aguiar

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  1. María Ester Ferrero
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Ferrero, M.E., Blanco-Aguiar, J.A. & Dávila, J.A. Climatic and geographic effects on the spatial genetic pattern of a landbird species (Alectoris rufa) on the Iberian Peninsula. Popul Ecol 58, 429–440 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10144-016-0553-2

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