PhD defence Vicente Castillo Chora

Vicente Castillo Chora (TRÊS)

Promotor: Prof. R.S. Etienne; copromotor: Dr A.G. Navarro Sigüenza (UNAM)

Drivers of distribution patterns of Mesoamerican tropical forest birds

Throughout this thesis, I focus on the processes driving avian richness in the Mesoamerican lowland forests in the Neotropical region, by analyzing the assembly pattern through time of passerine communities in the Mesoamerican lowlands. I first focus on the analysis of the community of Yucatan Peninsula (YP) from an island biogeography approach, according to which diversity is given by stochastic processes of immigration, speciation and extinction. I also analyze, from an approach based on climatic niches, the putative factors that could be influencing the past and current distribution of bird species from the geographic and ecological context of the lowland forests, using a clade the New World Jays as a study model. Finally, I review some of the effects of differentiation and speciation, beyond the geographical perspective, specifically in cases in which secondary sympatry originates. In this review, I integrate the effects of such encounters from a genomic, genetic and morphological perspective, with the premise that these microevolutionary processes may have consequences on population-based dynamics, the maintenance of differentiation and distribution patterns, which is ultimately related to diversity at the regional level.

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