Population Genetic Diversity in the Australian ‘Seascape’: A Bioregion Approach

Genetic diversity within species may promote resilience to environmental change, yet little is known about how such variation is distributed at broad geographic scales. Here we develop a novel Bayesian methodology to analyse multi-species genetic diversity data in order to identify regions of high or low genetic diversity. We apply this method to co-distributed taxa from Australian marine waters. We extracted published summary statistics of population genetic diversity from 118 studies of 101 species and > 1000 populations from the Australian marine economic zone. We analysed these data using two approaches: a linear mixed model for standardised data, and a mixed beta-regression for unstandardised data, within a Bayesian framework. Our beta-regression approach performed better than models using standardised data, based on posterior predictive tests. The best model included region (Integrated Marine and Coastal Regionalisation of Australia (IMCRA) bioregions), latitude and latitude squared. Removing region as an explanatory variable greatly reduced model performance (delta DIC 23.4). Several bioregions were identified as possessing notably high genetic diversity. Genetic diversity increased towards the equator with a ‘hump’ in diversity across the range studied (−9.4 to −43.7°S). Our results suggest that factors correlated with both region and latitude play a role in shaping intra-specific genetic diversity, and that bioregion can be a useful management unit for intra-specific as well as species biodiversity. Our novel statistical model should prove useful for future analyses of within species genetic diversity at broad taxonomic and geographic scales.