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The Hoopoe Starling Fregilupus varius is an extinct species of the Sturnidae that was endemic to Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean. The species rapidly disappeared in the middle of the 19th century, primarily because of overexploitation by humans. We generated an approximately 11× coverage genome to reconstruct the demographic history of the Hoopoe Starling and compared these results with the demographic histories of other starlings and myna species. Our analyses confirmed the close affinities of the Hoopoe Starling with the genera Sturnia, Leucopsar and Sturnornis, and revealed that it went through a strong population bottleneck during its evolutionary history, but that its effective population size was not particularly low when compared with other extinct or critically endangered species of birds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European green woodpecker, Picus viridis, is a widely distributed species found in the Western Palearctic region. Here, we assembled a highly contiguous genome assembly for this species using a combination of short- and long-read sequencing and scaffolded with chromatin conformation capture (Hi-C). The final genome assembly was 1.28 Gb and features a scaffold N50 of 37 Mb and a scaffold L50 of 39.165 Mb. The assembly incorporates 89.4% of the genes identified in birds in OrthoDB. Gene and repetitive content annotation on the assembly detected 15,805 genes and a ∼30.1% occurrence of repetitive elements, respectively. Analysis of synteny demonstrates the fragmented nature of the P. viridis genome when compared to the chicken (Gallus gallus). The assembly and annotations produced in this study will certainly help for further research into the genomics of P. viridis and the comparative evolution of woodpeckers. Five historical and seven contemporary samples have been resequenced and may give insights on the population history of this species., Competing Interests: Conflicts of interest The author(s) declare no conflicts of interest., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Genetics Society of America.)