Literature survey
The database used for this synthesis was compiled from searches in the Web of Science® (Institute of Scientific Information, Thomson Scientific). Web of Science is an online academic database from ISI Web of Knowledge® that provides access to information about indexed research journals worldwide. We searched all Web of Science databases for scientific articles published from 1987 (regarded as the birth of phylogeography; Avise, 1987) to 2019 using the following keywords and Boolean command combinations: population* genetic* OR phylogeo*; AND Brazil*; AND ocean* OR sea* OR island OR reef OR rocky shore OR benthic OR marine OR coast*. Preliminary results identified 1380 articles, several of them outside the target parameters. Thus, we used the following secondary filters to further sort phylogeographic articles addressing specifically marine species that occur in Brazil: NOT “Atlantic forest” OR rainforest* OR freshwater. After applying secondary filters, 1170 articles remained.
A third-level filtering was performed by hand, visually scanning each article (i.e. title, abstract, hypotheses, material and methods, or results), and excluding those with the following characteristics: review articles; conference abstracts; technique articles; articles that studied viruses and bacteria (marine or otherwise) and human diseases; articles that presented only one sampled population in Brazil; articles that were purely taxonomic; articles that involved only populations located in offshore oceanic islands (i.e. São Pedro - São Paulo Archipelago, Trindade seamount chain Island, Rocas Atoll, Fernando de Noronha Archipelago, and Rio Grande seamount); articles that involved non-native Brazilian marine species; articles that despite claiming they implemented phylogeographic analyses, did not use molecular data to test for the presence of phylogeographic structure among populations; and articles addressing taxa that live in close proximity to the marine environment but do not depend in any way of the marine ecosystems to exist. Thus, this study focused on empirical, molecular data-driven phylogeographic articles that minimally addressed the Brazilian’s continental coastline and native marine biota, including marine birds and plant mangrove species.
All selected articles were fully read. A database was built based on information extracted from the articles and included: year of publication; species taxonomy assigned to 16 categories (Ascidiacea, Aves, Cetacea, Cnidaria, Crustacea, Echinodermata, Fishes, Kinorhynch, Mollusca, Nemertea, Otariidae, Plantae, Platyhelminthes, Polychaeta, Porifera, and Testudinata); number of analyzed taxa per article; sample site locations (city, state and geopolitical zone name, coordinates); genetic markers used (technique, genome and name of used genes); presence or absence and number of genetic discontinuities reported, locations from where genetic discontinuities were reported; classifications of species habitat (as benthic, pelagic, or aerial) and functional forms (invertebrates, vertebrates, or plants). Basic statistics were calculated from this database using Microsoft Excel tools.
In this study we refer to article (s ) each and every publication or unique reference, and we refer to ’study (-ies )’ each species with phylogeographic information found within each article. Therefore, some articles were comprised of only one study, while multi-taxon articles contained two or more studies (taxa).