The disjunct mesic forests of the Pacific Northwest, occurring on the west side of North America's Coastal Ranges as well as in the Northern Rocky Mountains, have emerged as a model system for comparative phylogeography. Less well‐known, however, are the alpine and subalpine plants that mirror this distribution—here referred to as the Maritime Alpine Disjuncts. The phylogeographic histories of lowland coastal disjunct species...

Pleistocene glacial cycles drastically changed the distributions of taxa endemic to temperate rainforests in the Pacific Northwest, with many experiencing reduced habitat suitability during glacial periods. In this study, we investigate whether glacial cycles promoted intraspecific divergence and whether subsequent range changes led to secondary contact and gene flow. For seven invertebrate species endemic to the PNW, we estim...

The disjunct temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest of North America (PNW) are characterized by late‐successional dominant tree species Thuja plicata (western redcedar) and Tsuga heterophylla (western hemlock). The demographic histories of these species, along with the PNW rainforest ecosystem in its entirety, have been heavily impacted by geological and climatic changes the PNW has experienced over the last 5 million...

Using multiple, independent approaches to molecular species delimitation is advocated to accommodate limitations and assumptions of a single approach. Incongruence in delimitation schemes is a potential by‐product of employing multiple methods on the same data, and little attention has been paid to its reconciliation. Instead, a particular scheme is prioritized, and/or molecular delimitations are coupled with additional, indep...

Model selection approaches in phylogeography have allowed researchers to evaluate the support for competing demographic histories, which provides a mode of inference and a measure of uncertainty in understanding climatic and spatial influences on intraspecific diversity. Here, to rank all models in the comparison set and determine what proportion of the total support the top‐ranked model garners, we conduct model selection usi...

Aim Plants occurring on high‐alpine summits are generally expected to persist due to adaptations to extreme selective forces caused by the harshest climates where angiosperm life is known to thrive. We assessed the relative effects of this strong environmental filter and of other historical and stochastic factors driving plant community structure in very high‐alpine conditions. Location European Alps, Écrins National Park, Fra...

Phylogeographic data sets have grown from tens to thousands of loci in recent years, but extant statistical methods do not take full advantage of these large data sets. For example, approximate Bayesian computation ( ABC ) is a commonly used method for the explicit comparison of alternate demographic histories, but it is limited by the “curse of dimensionality” and issues related to the simulation and summarization of data whe...

Phylogeographic inference has typically relied on analyses of data from one or a few genes to provide estimates of demography and population histories. While much has been learned from these studies, all phylogeographic analysis is conditioned on the data, and thus, inferences derived from data that represent a small sample of the genome are unavoidably tenuous. Here, we demonstrate one approach for moving beyond classic phylo...