Sushma Reddy

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Minnesota

Gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) are found across the Southern Ocean with a circumpolar distribution and notable genetic and morphological variation across their geographic range. Whether this geographic variation represents species‐level diversity has yet to be investigated in an integrative taxonomic framework. Here, we show that four distinct...

Despite its status as a global biodiversity hotspot there is still much to be discovered about the birds of Madagascar, including a full accounting of species-level diversity and the avifauna's origins. The Bernieridae is a Malagasy endemic family that went unrecognized by science for decades and unnamed until 2010. This cryptic family has long rep...

Madagascar is known as a biodiversity hotspot, providing an ideal natural laboratory for investigating the processes of avian diversification. Yet, the phylogeography of Madagascar's avifauna is still largely unexamined. In this study, we evaluated phylogeographic patterns and species limits within the Rufous Vanga, Schetba rufa, a monotypic genus...

Range-restricted species generally have specific niche requirements and may often have unique evolutionary histories. Unfortunately, many of these species severely lack basic research, resulting in poor conservation strategies. The phylogenetic relationship of the Critically Endangered Forest Owlet Heteroglaux blewitti has been the subject of a cen...

Molecular phylogenetic approaches have greatly improved our knowledge of the pattern and process of biological diversification across the globe; however, many regions remain poorly documented, even for well-studied vertebrate groups. The Philippine archipelago, one of the least-studied 'biodiversity hotspots', is an ideal natural laboratory for inv...

Background: A long-standing view of Indian biodiversity is that while rich in species, there are few endemics or in-situ radiations within the subcontinent. One exception is the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot, an isolated mountain range with many endemic species. Understanding the origins of the montane-restricted species is crucial to illumin...

Co-occurrence of closely related taxa on islands could be attributed to sympatric speciation or multiple colonization. Sympatric speciation is considered to be rare in small islands however multiple colonizations could be common in both oceanic and continental islands. Sri Lanka is a continental island in the Indian continental shelf of the Norther...

Co-occurrence of closely related taxa on islands could be attributed to sympatric speciation or multiple colonization. Sympatric speciation is considered to be rare in small islands, however multiple colonizations are known to be common in both oceanic and continental islands. In this study we investigated the phylogenetic relatedness and means of...

Morphometric measurements used for the morphometric analysis. 1. weight 2. head length 3. head width 4. Total culmen 5. Exposed culmen 6. bill height 7. bill width 8. thickness of the eye-ring; eye ring (a) 9. opening of the ring; eye ring (b) 10. diameter of the eye-ring; eye ring (c) 11. eye ring width 12. flattened wing length 13. tarsus (right)...

Sample ID or band number, tissue source and collection locality for each species used in the phylogenetic study with GenBank accession numbers for each gene sequence. Footnote. FMNH, The Field Museum of Natural History; KUNHM, University of Kansas Natural History Museum; LSUMNS, Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science; USNM, National M...

Eigen values for each variable in each principal component (PC) resulted from the principal component analysis. (DOCX)

Scree plot. This plots the eigen values associated with each PC. At PC4 the slope of the curve levels off, hence only PC1, PC2 and PC3 were used for the analysis. (TIF)

Phylogenomics, the use of large-scale data matrices in phylogenetic analyses, has been viewed as the ultimate solution to the problem of resolving difficult nodes in the tree of life. However, it has become clear that analyses of these large genomic datasets can also result in conflicting estimates of phylogeny. Here we use the early divergences in...

The Streak-breasted Scimitar Babblers of the Pomatorhinus ruficollis species complex are found in most of the forested habitats across southern and eastern Asia. The diversification history of this group is obscured by high plumage variation across populations and conflicting genetic signal across loci. We combined genetic and geographic data from...

No abstract is available for this article.

As developing countries give priority to economic growth, the effects of development threaten natural habitats and species distributions. Over the course of two decades, Vietnam has rapidly developed, especially in the expansion of agricultural production. However, no study has quantitatively measured the effects of recent human impact on the effec...

The accumulation of vast numbers of molecular phylogenetic studies has contributed to huge knowledge gains in the evolutionary history of birds. This permits subsequent analyses of avian diversity, such as how and why diversification varies across the globe and among taxonomic groups. However, available genetic data for these meta-analyses are unev...

Insertion/deletion (indel) mutations, which are represented by gaps in multiple sequence alignments, have been used to examine phylogenetic hypotheses for some time. However, most analyses combine gap data with the nucleotide sequences in which they are embedded, probably because most phylogenetic datasets include few gap characters. Here, we repor...

We present the first extensive and integrative analysis of niche evolution based on climatic variables and a dated molecular phylogeny of a heterogeneous avian group of Southeast Asian scimitar babblers of the genus Pomatorhinus. The four main clades of scimitar babblers have species that co-occur in similar areas across southern Asia but some have...

Predicted niche occupancy plots (PNO) for the four clades (panels A, B, C, D) of Pomatorhinus scimitar babblers. Color scheme follows Figure 5. Bioclimatic layers used in the MAXENT modeling algorithm are listed by their names and abbreviations as outlined in Figure 2. Species abbreviations have been omitted. Vertical axes represent cumulative unit...

Disparity through time plots (DTT) of all Pomatorhinus scimitar babblers. Plots depict the 10 bioclimatic layers with highest model contribution used in the MAXENT modeling algorithm, and include the entire 29 species of Pomatorhinus scimitar babblers. Vertical axes represent disparity, while horizontal axes depict evolutionary time. Observed value...

Ecological niche models of 29 Southeast Asian Pomatorhinus scimitar babblers. Models are based on MAXENT thresholded (minimum training presence) binary outputs. Areas in red represent regions of predicted to support populations based on 10 bioclimatic features with highest model contribution across all 29 scimitar babbler species. Species are group...

Plots summarizing the evolution of climatic tolerances in Pomatorhinus scimitar babblers. Plots are based on PNO profiles for 10 bioclimatic layers with highest model contribution used in the MAXENT modeling algorithm. Abbreviations for each of these variables are given in Figure 2. Colors denote different clades and follow the same scheme used in...

The Philippines is characterized by a high rate of endemism among its terrestrial vertebrates, including enigmatic genera with uncertain affinities. In a recent comprehensive study of the avian family of Timaliidae (babblers), it was shown that three putative babbler genera endemic to the Philippines (Leonardina, Robsonius, and Micromacronus) are d...

The avian family Timaliidae is a species rich and morphologically diverse component of African and Asian tropical forests. The morphological diversity within the family has attracted interest from ecologists and evolutionary biologists, but systematists have long suspected that this diversity might also mislead taxonomy, and recent molecular phylog...

The vangas of Madagascar exhibit extreme diversity in morphology and ecology. Recent studies have shown that several other Malagasy species also are part of this endemic radiation, even as the monophyly of the clade remains in question. Using DNA sequences from 13 genes and representatives of all 15 vanga genera, we find strong support for the mono...

Microinversions are cytologically undetectable inversions of DNA sequences that accumulate slowly in genomes. Like many other rare genomic changes (RGCs), microinversions are thought to be virtually homoplasy-free evolutionary characters, suggesting that they may be very useful for difficult phylogenetic problems such as the avian tree of life. How...

Supplementary information. Six figures, three tables, and supplementary methods (including the details of the literature survey used to estimate the rates of various types of genomic changes and the power analysis described in the main text), in pdf format.

Details of a microinversion search. An example of a microinversion search (of TPM1 intron 6) is presented along with a description of the search algorithm using pseudocode, in Microsoft Excel format.

Taxon list. List of the taxa used for this analysis and the accession numbers for the novel CLTCL1 sequences collected for this study, in Microsoft Excel format.

Monophyly of the scimitar babblers (Pomatorhinus, Xiphirhynchus: Timaliidae), traditionally defined by the characteristic of having long, curved bills, has been questioned by recent molecular phylogenetic results. We examined representatives of all scimitar babbler species complexes, including all distinct lineages of four complexes as well as seve...

We describe Laniarius willardi, a new species of boubou shrike (Malaconotidae) from the Albertine Rift of Africa. The most conspicuous, distinguishing morphological feature of the species is a gray to blue-gray iris. This and external morphometric data indicate that L. willardi is diagnosable from other black or sooty boubous. Further, L. willardi...

Ratites (ostriches, emus, rheas, cassowaries, and kiwis) are large, flightless birds that have long fascinated biologists. Their current distribution on isolated southern land masses is believed to reflect the breakup of the paleocontinent of Gondwana. The prevailing view is that ratites are monophyletic, with the flighted tinamous as their sister...

A fundamental expectation of vicariance biogeography is for contemporary cladogenesis to produce spatial congruence between speciating sympatric clades. The Uroplatus leaf-tailed geckos represent one of most spectacular reptile radiations endemic to the continental island of Madagascar, and thus serve as an excellent group for examining patterns of...

Deep avian evolutionary relationships have been difficult to resolve as a result of a putative explosive radiation. Our study examined ∼32 kilobases of aligned nuclear DNA sequences from 19 independent loci for 169 species, representing all major extant groups, and recovered a robust phylogeny from a genome-wide signal supported by multiple analyti...

Patterns of avian diversification in southern Asia are poorly understood due to the limited number of phylogenetic and biogeographic studies of endemic groups, mainly due to the dearth of recent tissue samples and a historical taxonomic bias underestimating avifaunal diversity. A systematic analysis of the endemic genus Pteruthius, the shrike-babbl...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 2005. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 277342). Department: Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology.

Aim To design and apply statistical tests for measuring sampling bias in the raw data used to the determine priority areas for conservation, and to discuss their impact on conservation analyses for the region. Location Sub-Saharan Africa. Methods An extensive data set comprising 78,083 vouchered locality records for 1068 passerine birds in sub-Saha...