Island size shapes genomic diversity in a great speciator (Aves: Zosterops)

Islands have long represented natural laboratories for studying many aspects of ecology and evolutionary biology, from speciation to community assembly. One aspect that has been well documented is the correlation between island size and taxonomic diversity, likely due to decreased complexity and population size on small islands. This same logic can apply to genetic diversity, which should predictably decrease with effective population size. The island size-diversity correlation has received support over the years, but often focuses on simple metrics of genetic diversity. Here, we use Zosterops white-eyes in the Solomon Islands to study the correlation between island size and various metrics related to genetic diversity, including runs of homozygosity and fixation of transposable elements. We find that almost all of these metrics strongly correlate with island size, and in turn with each other. We infer that island size is independently correlated with these different variables, demonstrating that population size impacts genomic metrics of diversity in a variety of ways across temporal and hierarchical scales.

Methods
The dataset is whole-genome resquencing data at moderate depth of Zosterops white-eyes from the Solomon Islands, with one sample per island available. Variants were called on the data to generate input files for a variety of programs, where multiple statistics relating to genetic diversity were calculated were calculated