Effects of climate change on the evolution of Brown Creeper (Certhia americana) lineages

ABSTRACT Understanding how distributions of species change through time allows evaluation of hypotheses about factors shaping biogeographic patterns and evolutionary trajectories of genetic lineages. Ideally, such studies would assess whether population genetic processes are associated with geographic distribution shifts, loss or gain of distributional area through time, or fragmentation of distributional areas, information that can now be derived via ecological niche modeling. We examined the distributional changes through time in lineages and populations of Brown Creeper (Certhia americana), a widespread North American bird, to test biogeographic and population genetic hypotheses. In two populations with genetic support for population bottlenecks, Monterey County in California and the Sierra Madre Oriental in Mexico, ecological niche models indicated range contractions and increased fragmentation since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Projections of niche models to the future suggested continuation of ra...