African biodiversity

I am interested in the historical events and paleoclimatic and/or geomorphological processes that shaped the evolutionary histories of different mammalian species, particularly the way these factors have affected genetic variation, past population dynamics and population structure in species from all of the major African biomes. For comprehensive sampling of natural populations and range-wide population genomics analyses, we have relied on large museum collections and scientific expeditions to the field.

Representative publications on this topic include:

1. Joana L. Rocha, Pedro Silva, Nuno Santos, Monia Nakamura, Sandra Afonso, Abdeljebbar Qninba, Zbyszek Boratynski, Peter H. Sudmant, Jose C. Brito, Rasmus Nielsen‡ and Raquel Godinho‡ (2023), North-African fox genomes show signatures of repeated introgression and adaptation to life in deserts (Nature Ecology and Evolution; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02094-w).
2. Joana L. Rocha *, Pedro Vaz Pinto *, Hans R. Siegismund, Matthias Meyer, Bettine Jansen van Vuuren, Luis Verismo, Nuno Ferrand, Raquel Godinho (2022) African Climate and geomorphology drive evolution and ghost introgression in sable antelope (cover of Molecular Ecology; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.16427) *denotes co-first author,‡denotes co-last author