Addressing climate change and biodiversity loss will be the defining ecological, political, and humanitarian challenge of our time. Alarmingly, policymakers face a narrowing window of opportunity to prevent the worst impacts, necessitating complex decisions about which land to set aside for biodiversity preservation. Yet, our ability to make these decisions is hindered by our limited capacity to predict how species will respond...

The genus Boiga includes 35, primarily arboreal snake species distributed from the Middle East to Australia and many islands in the western Pacific, with particularly high species diversity in South-East Asia. Despite including the iconic mangrove snakes (Boiga dendrophila complex) and the brown tree snake (Boiga irregularis; infamous for avian extinctions on small islands of the Pacific), species-level phylogenetic relationships and the...

A primary goal of biogeography is to understand how large-scale environmental processes, like climate change, affect diversification. One often-invoked but seldom tested process is the “species-pump” model, in which repeated bouts of cospeciation are driven by oscillating climate-induced habitat connectivity cycles. For example, over the past three million years, the landscape of the Philippine Islands has repeatedly coalesced and fragmented due to...

Regions with complex geological histories often have diverse and highly endemic biotas, yet inferring the ecological and historical processes shaping this relationship remains challenging. Here, in the context of the taxon cycle model of insular community assembly,we investigate patterns of lineage diversity and habitat usage in a newly characterized vertebrate radiation centred upon the world’s most geologically complex insular region: island arcs...

The aridification of Africa resulted in the fragmentation of forests and the expansion of an arid corridor stretching from the northeast to southwest portion of sub-Saharan Africa, but the role this corridor has had in species-level diversification of southern African vertebrates is poorly understood. The skink species Mochlus afer and M. sundevallii inhabit wide areas of the arid corridor and are therefore...

We utilize robust geographical genetic sampling, and phylogenetic analysis of a new multilocus dataset to provide the first inference of relationships among Philippine Gonocephalus, combined with estimates of putative species diversity, in this almost unknown island radiation. Our results reveal startling levels of undocumented diversity, genetically partitioned at a number of geographical levels across the archipelago. We present the first survey of...

Recent higher-level frog phylogenetic analyses have included a few members of the endemic Philippine frog genus Sanguirana. Although the monophyly of the group has never been disputed, the recent phylogenetically-supported inclusion of the Palawan Wood Frog (Sanguirana sanguinea) in this clade was highly unexpected. In addition, species boundaries and relationships remain unclear and new species continue to be discovered. We estimate the...

Our expeditions to Gabon to study to the river biogeography of the Ogooué was very productive. In 5 weeks, we sampled over 1000 amphibians and reptiles from 7 different stations spread around the entire river. Since Gabon has seen so little herpetological work it was impossible for us to know which species would be the focal species of the study until we...

We describe two new species of morphologically cryptic monitor lizards (genus Varanus) from the Philippine Archipelago: Varanus dalubhasa sp. nov. and V. bangonorum sp. nov. These two distinct evolutionary lineages are members of the V. salvator species complex, and historically have been considered conspecific with the widespread, northern Philippine V. marmoratus. However, the new species each share closer phylogenetic affinities with V....

Some of Southeast Asia’s most enigmatic reptile species include the arboreal (tree-dwelling), frugivorous (fruit-eating) monitor lizards of the central and northern Philippines. Comprised of just three known species, this distinct group has even been assigned to its own subgenus, Philippinosaurus on the basis on cranial features and dentition (characteristics of the teeth). Knowledge on the biology of Philippine frugivorous monitor lizards has...

The Philippines represent an ideal region for examining the effects of geologic and climatic influences on evolutionary processes and the accumulation of new species. Though the monitor lizard is the target of conservation efforts, little research has looked at the geological processes which have shaped the evolution and distribution of this group. Asian water monitors (Varanus salvator Complex) are distributed throughout a...