Abstract
The
integration of species distributions and evolutionary relationships is
one of the most rapidly moving research fields today and has led to
considerable advances in our understanding of the processes underlying
biogeographical patterns. Here, we develop a set of metrics, the
specific overrepresentation score (SOS) and the geographic node
divergence (GND) score, which together combine ecological and
evolutionary patterns into a single framework and avoids many of the
problems that characterize community phylogenetic methods in current
use.This approach goes through each node in the phylogeny and
compares the distributions of descendant clades to a null model. The
method employs a balanced null model, is independent of phylogeny size,
and allows an intuitive visualization of the results.We
demonstrate how this novel implementation can be used to generate
hypotheses for biogeographical patterns with case studies on two groups
with well-described biogeographical histories: a local-scale community
data set of hummingbirds in the North Andes, and a large-scale data set
of the distribution of all species of New World flycatchers. The
node-based analysis of these two groups generates a set of intuitively
interpretable patterns that are consistent with current biogeographical
knowledge.Importantly, the results are statistically tractable,
opening many possibilities for their use in analyses of evolutionary,
historical and spatial patterns of species diversity. The method is
implemented as an upcoming R package nodiv, which makes it accessible and easy to use.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Methods in Ecology and Evolution |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue number | 11 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1225-1235 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| ISSN | 2041-210X |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Nov 2014 |