Abstract
The Korean Peninsula, located at the southern tip of Northeast Asia, has never been covered by ice sheets and was a temperate refugium during the Pleistocene. Karsenia koreana, the sole Asian plethodontid salamander species, occurs only on the southern half of the Korean Peninsula and is thought to have found various climatic refugia. Despite its phylogenetic and biogeographic importance, no population-level genetic analysis has been performed on this species. Here we study the population genetic structure of K. koreana using mitochondrial and microsatellite loci to understand the recent historical dispersion process that shaped its current distribution. Overall, the genetic distance between populations correlated well with the spatial distance, and the genetic structure among populations showed signs of a unilateral northward expansion from a southernmost refugium population. Given the distinct genetic structure formed among the populations, the level of historical gene flow among populations appears to have been very low. As the estimated effective population size of K. koreana was also small, these results suggest that the small, restricted populations of K. koreana are extremely vulnerable to environmental changes that may require high levels of genetic diversity to cope with. Thus, special management strategies are needed to preserve these remnant populations.
Highlights
The Korean Peninsula, located at the southern tip of Northeast Asia, has never been covered by ice sheets and was a temperate refugium during the Pleistocene
The Korean Peninsula has features that make it attractive for phylogeographic studies. It is located at the southern tip of Northeast Asia and has never been covered by ice sheets, it was indirectly affected by the northern glaciation of the Quaternary[8]
Since K. koreana was first described, researchers have attempted to determine its phylogenetic placement as a means of inferring how this species became distributed in A sia[20,21]
Summary
The Korean Peninsula, located at the southern tip of Northeast Asia, has never been covered by ice sheets and was a temperate refugium during the Pleistocene. It is located at the southern tip of Northeast Asia and has never been covered by ice sheets, it was indirectly affected by the northern glaciation of the Quaternary[8] This area is characterized by a mountainous terrain resulting from complex geological activity, which offered temperate habitats or glacial refugia during the Quaternary glaciations[9]. Genetic studies of Hynobius and Onychodactylus salamander species on the Korean Peninsula detected a high level of intraspecific phylogeographic s tructure[12,13], the existence of cryptic d iversity[11,12] and evolutionary relatedness to species inhabiting areas north of the peninsula These results suggest that the Korean Peninsula provided glacial refugia for salamander species that migrated southward. The most convincing hypothesis suggests that a small ancestral group of K. koreana migrated from western North America to Eurasia through the Bering Land Bridge around 65 M a19,22
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