Population Genomics, Ecology and Conservation of Asterias Sea Stars in the North Atlantic

• Main Author: Giakoumis, Melenia I.
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: CUNY Academic Works 2023
• Subjects: population genomics; marine invertebrates; intertidal ecology; marine conservation; echinoderm; Biodiversity; Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Evolution; Genomics; Marine Biology; Population Biology; Aguirre; Mathieu; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5422; https://academicworks.cuny.edu/context/gc_etds/article/6521/viewcontent/DissertationFinal_052523.pdf

Uncovering how species respond to environmental change is a central question in biology (Ehrlén & Morris 2015; Habibullah et al. 2022). It is the key to elucidating the past, understanding the present and predicting the future of species’ population dynamics. This dissertation investigates the influence of environmental change on intertidal species’ distributions and genomics at several timescales, with implications for conservation. Environmental changes have occurred throughout history, on a geological scale, and have shaped the global patterns of species’ distributions and population sizes. Biologists have long studied how geological history has shaped species distributions (Sanmartín 2012) in both terrestrial (Liu et al. 2019; Musher et al. 2022) and marine systems (Addison & Hart 2005; Woodhouse et al. 2023). Ancient processes, such as glaciation patterns and climate fluctuations, can also leave signatures in species’ genomes (Miller et al. 2012; Liu et al. 2019). With recent advances in genomic sequencing, it is now possible to investigate the influence of environmental processes along the genome and across the globe, even in non-model organisms for which we have little other context (Ellegren et al. 2012; Rincon-Sandoval et al. 2019). On a more recent timescale, genome-wide data can be used to assess the current dynamics of species. This includes local adaptation to the environment (Prates et al. 2018) and how population structure and hybridization is shaped by environmental forces (Kruuk et al. 1999; Taylor et al. 2014). In tandem with ecological modeling, such as species distribution models (SDMs), we can also assess global species distributions, and how they are influenced by these environmental factors along with genomic variation (Ehrlén & Morris 2015; Mathieu-Bégné et al. 2021; Aguirre-Liguori et al. 2021). In the face of a rapidly changing climate, we can use these methods to infer information about environmental influences on current dynamics to predict what might occur to species ...