7 Earth Life Sciences across the Cordillera (Posters)

This session showcases interdisciplinary research that bridges geological sciences with allied fields including (but not limited to) genetics, ecology, biogeography, archaeology, informatics to emphasize innovative approaches to understand the interconnectedness of Earth systems.

Wednesday, 22 April 2026
8:00 AM - 5:30 PM
LMH, 5th Floor Chapel

LINKING THE DOTS: Evaluation of the congruence between neutral and selective processes shaping populations and species assemblages in the marine environment

Paper number: 7-5
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 8:00 AM – 8:00 AM

Authors

Abstract

Understanding the mechanisms that generate and maintain biodiversity across spatial and environmental gradients is a central challenge in ecology and evolutionary biology. While community ecology has traditionally focused on processes operating at the level of species assemblages—such as environmental filtering, ecological drift, and dispersal—evolutionary biology has emphasized population-level processes, including natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow, and mutation. Although both disciplines share the goal of explaining spatial patterns of biodiversity, they have largely developed in parallel. However, their integration is essential for advancing a unified eco-evolutionary framework capable of explaining both species turnover and intraspecific genetic divergence across space, as well as their interrelationships and causal effects. Testing specific hypotheses about these interconnections in marine systems requires an ecological setting characterized by high environmental and oceanographic complexity, along with species assemblages that respond to and adapt to such heterogeneity. The Gulf of California represents a natural laboratory, with a rich geological history, pronounced environmental gradients, and complex oceanographic dynamics that have shaped a partially concordant assemblage of diverse marine taxa. In this context, cryptobenthic fishes—owing to their small body size, habitat specificity, and limited dispersal capacity—constitute an ideal system for evaluating the coupling between community-level and evolutionary processes. This study evaluates: (1) the congruence of neutral and adaptive genomic–evolutionary patterns in three co-distributed cryptobenthic fish species belonging to different families; (2) the beta diversity of cryptobenthic fish assemblages across the same geographic scale; and (3) the congruence between lineage divergence and cryptobenthic fish assemblage structure, and their relationship with geographic distance (neutral processes/dispersal/connectivity) and environmental variability (selection/turnover).

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 58, No. 3

doi: 10.1130/abs/2026CD-411081

© Copyright 2026 The Geological Society of America (GSA), all rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to the author(s) of this abstract to reproduce and distribute it freely, for noncommercial purposes. Permission is hereby granted to any individual scientist to download a single copy of this electronic file and reproduce up to 20 paper copies for noncommercial purposes advancing science and education, including classroom use, providing all reproductions include the complete content shown here, including the author information. All other forms of reproduction and/or transmittal are prohibited without written permission from GSA Copyright Permissions.