Ortego Lab

Our understanding about the foremost proximate mechanisms driving the formation and persistence of independently evolving lineages (i.e., species) is still tremendously limited. This could be in part due to the scarce integration of microevolutionary processes into macroevolutionary inference, which has hampered our capacity to identify the ecological and evolutionary phenomena that jointly operate to shape current patterns of biological diversity. A potential way to fill this gap is integrating accurate estimates of key demographic and evolutionary processes operating at microevolutionary scales within macroevolutionary inference frameworks. Research in this direction is promising but still at its early infancy. The increased capacity to generate large genomic datasets in non-model organisms and the continuous development of versatile analytical approaches allows us now to infer evolutionary and demographic parameters at an unprecedented resolution. As a result, we can now confidentially estimate the timing and magnitude of demographic fluctuations, infer rates of gene flow among populations, and determine the occurrence, extent, direction and timing of hybridization. All these phenomena are presumed to be closely associated with opportunity of species formation and lineage persistence, but formal evaluation of their impacts on rates of species formation is still very limited.