When high dispersal meets high diversification: the case of the White-bellied Cuckooshrike, Coracina papuensis

Within the Indo-Pacific, understory birds have received the majority of phylogeographic investigation while canopy birds are comparatively under-studied. The White-bellied Cuckooshrike (Coracina papuensis), generally considered a canopy species, contains 13–15 described taxa but lacks a modern genomic dataset corroborating these distinctions. Therefore, we evaluated the phylogeography of C. papuensis using genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms for 49 individuals representing the taxa with available tissue samples (10 of the 13–15). We identified varying support for eight different lineages with limited diversification across the Australian continental shelf but surprisingly we found support for two lineages in eastern Papua New Guinea (Central and Oro Provinces) and evidence of long-distance dispersal.