African lovebirds are popular pet parrots commonly hybridized by breeders leading to genetic admixture. Trade escapees and land use change have now led lovebirds to genetically admix in the wild. Sampling origin is therefore of utmost importance when deriving genetic data from lovebird species to reconstruct phylogeny or historical demographic events as the inclusion of taxa of hybrid origin is a source of spurious results. Here we present complete genomes of all nine currently recognized lovebird species. Each species is represented by an archival geo-referenced individual collected within their natural range.
Dueker et al. (Sat,) studied this question.