Despite rampant coastal development throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific, studies of conservation genetics and ecology of vulnerable, coastal species are rare. Large bodied vertebrates with highly specialized habitat requirements may be at particular risk of extinction due to habitat degradation and fragmentation, especially if these habitats are naturally patchily distributed, marginal, otherwise geographically limited, or associated in space with high human...

Aim To highlight the significant conservation challenge of evaluating peripheral endemic vertebrates in island archipelago systems and to assess empirically the complexities of approaches to conservation genetic studies across political and biogeographic boundaries. To demonstrate the poignant need for international collaboration and coordination when species delimitation problems with high conservation concern involve island endemics with biogeographically peripheral ranges. Location Southeast Asia, Lanyu...

Widespread, co-distributed species with limited relative dispersal abilities represent compelling focal taxa for comparative phylogeography. Forest vertebrates in island archipelagos often exhibit pronounced population structure resulting from limited dispersal abilities or capacity to overcome marine barriers to dispersal. The exceptionally diverse Old World tree frogs of the family Rhacophoridae have colonized the forested island archipelagos of Southeast Asia on multiple occasions, entering...

Aim To utilize comprehensive geographical sampling and a new, multilocus dataset to re-examine the biogeography of spotted stream frogs (Hylarana signata complex) throughout Southeast Asia. To compare patterns of diversification among stream frog populations on land-bridge islands and oceanic islands and to re-evaluate a previous ‘dual-invasion’ hypothesis for the origins of endemic Philippine taxa. Location Southeast Asia, Sundaland, and the Philippines. Methods...

Island ecosystems often consist of many types of unique organisms and therefore are very important to conservation efforts. Deforestation, pollution, and a lack of protection of these islands cause many species to go endangered or extinct. In order to protect these endemic species it is important for scientists to study and identify the phylogenetic lineages of the many species living here. This...

We provide a phylogenetic and population genetic evaluation of the illegal pet and bush meat trade of monitor lizards in the Philippines. We use a molecular dataset assembled from vouchered samples with known localities throughout the country, as a reference for statistical phylogenetic, population genetic, and DNA barcoding analyses of genetic material obtained during a three year survey of the Manila pet...

Recent conceptual, technological and methodological advances in phylogenetics have enabled increasingly robust statistical species delimitation in studies of biodiversity. As the variety of evidence purporting species diversity has increased, so too have the kinds of tools and inferential power of methods for delimiting species. Here, we showcase an organismal system for a data-rich, comparative molecular approach to evaluating strategies of species delimitation...

The diverse group of Asian wolf snakes of the genus Lycodon represents one of many poorly understood radiations of advanced snakes in the superfamily Colubroidea. Outside of three species having previously been represented in higher-level phylogenetic analyses, nothing is known of the relationships among species in this unique, moderately diverse, group. The genus occurs widely from central to Southeast Asia, and contains...

In theory, competition among species in a shared habitat results in niche separation. In the case of small recondite mammals such as shrews, little is known about their autecologies, leaving open questions regarding the degree to which closely related species co-occur and how or whether ecological niches are partitioned. The extent to which species are able to coexist may depend on the...

Living amphibians exhibit a diversity of ecologies, life histories, and species-rich lineages that offers opportunities for studies of adaptive radiation. We characterize a diverse clade of frogs (Kaloula, Microhylidae) in the Philippine island archipelago as an example of an adaptive radiation into three primary habitat specialists or ecotypes. We use a novel phylogenetic estimate for this clade to evaluate the tempo of...

Aim Widespread species found in disturbed habitats are often expected to be human commensals. In island systems, this association predicts that dispersal will be mediated by humans. We investigated the biogeographical relationships among populations of a widespread tree skink that inhabits coastal forest and human-cultivated plantations in Southeast Asia. We sought to determine whether populations of the emerald tree skink, Lamprolepis smaragdina,...