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Abstract:
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Pollen records in Eastern Beringia (EB) have been used to explore the possibility that the region harbored glacial refugia for arcto-boreal taxa. Recent genetic analyses add a new dimension to paleoecology and offer important new insights, with population and spatial details that cannot be achieved by the more traditional approaches. Both types of information suggest that several arcto-boreal species survived the Last Glacial Maximum in the region. However, the details remain unknown regarding the whereabouts of refugial population. Another type of information that had become popular lately is the species distribution models (SDM), which determine the probability of the species presence using environmental variables. Our study focuses on Alnus viridis, a dominant shrub in the arcto-boreal vegetation. We propose to integrate genomic, SDM, and existing fossil data in a hierarchical Bayesian modeling (HBM) framework to determine whether multiple refugia existed in isolated areas nested in a complex topography. Formal synthesis of such disparate data sources is nearly impossible with traditional statistical approaches, but the flexibility of HBMs makes the task feasible.
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