Founder-event speciation, where a rare jump dispersal event founds a new genetically isolated lineage, has long been considered crucial by many historical biogeographers, but its importance is disputed within the vicariance school. Probabilistic modeling of geographic range evolution creates the potential to test different biogeographical models against data using standard statistical model choice procedures, as long as multiple models are available. I re-implement the Dispersal-Extinction-Cladogenesis (DEC) model of LAGRANGE in the R package BioGeoBEARS, and modify it to create a new model, DEC+J, which adds founder-event speciation, the importance of which is governed by a new free parameter, j. The identifiability of DEC and DEC+J is tested on data sets simulated under a wide range of macroevolutionary models where geography evolves jointly with lineage birth/death events. The results confirm that DEC and DEC+J are identifiable even though these models ignore the fact that molecular phylogenies are missing many cladogenesis and extinction events. The simulations also indicate that DEC will have substantially increased errors in ancestral range estimation and parameter inference when the true model includes +J. DEC and DEC+J are compared on 13 empirical data sets drawn from studies of island clades. Likelihood-ratio tests indicate that all clades reject DEC, and AICc model weights show large to overwhelming support for DEC+J, for the first time verifying the importance of founder-event speciation in island clades via statistical model choice. Under DEC+J, ancestral nodes are usually estimated to have ranges occupying only one island, rather than the widespread ancestors often favored by DEC. These results indicate that the assumptions of historical biogeography models can have large impacts on inference and require testing and comparison with statistical methods. (BioGeoBEARS; cladogenesis; extinction; founder-event speciation; GeoSSE; historical biogeography; jump dispersal; LAGRANGE.)

Model Selection in Historical Biogeography Reveals that Founder-Event Speciation Is a Crucial Process in Island Clades

Historical biogeography has been characterized by a large diversity of methods and unresolved debates about which processes, such as dispersal or vicariance, are most important for explaining distributions. A new R package, BioGeoBEARS, implements many models in a common likelihood framework, so that standard statistical model selection procedures can be applied to let the data choose the best model. Available models include a likelihood version of DIVA (“DIVALIKE”), LAGRANGE’s DEC model, and BAYAREA, as well as “+J” versions of these models which include founder-event speciation, an important process left out of most inference methods. I use BioGeoBEARS on a large sample of island and non-island clades (including two fossil clades) to show that founder-event speciation is a crucial process in almost every clade, and that most published datasets reject the non-J models currently in widespread use. BioGeoBEARS is open-source and freely available for installation at the Comprehensive R Archive Network at http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=BioGeoBEARS. A step-by-step tutorial is available at http://phylo.wikidot.com/biogeobears.

/pdf/probabilistic-historical-biogeography-new-models-for-founder-33j2vpcyd4.pdf

Probabilistic historical biogeography: new models for founder-event speciation, imperfect detection, and fossils allow improved accuracy and model-testing

Applications of next-generation sequencing to phylogeography and phylogenetics

Biodiversity is unevenly distributed on Earth and hotspots of biodiversity are often associated with areas that have undergone orogenic activity during recent geological history (i.e. tens of millions of years). Understanding the underlying processes that have driven the accumulation of species in some areas and not in others may help guide prioritization in conservation and may facilitate forecasts on ecosystem services under future climate conditions. Consequently, the study of the origin and evolution of biodiversity in mountain systems has motivated growing scientific interest. Despite an increasing number of studies, the origin and evolution of diversity hotspots associated with the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) remains poorly understood. We review literature related to the diversification of organisms linked to the uplift of the QTP. To promote hypothesis-based research, we provide a geological and palaeoclimatic scenario for the region of the QTP and argue that further studies would benefit from providing a complete set of complementary analyses (molecular dating, biogeographic, and diversification rates analyses) to test for a link between organismic diversification and past geological and climatic changes in this region. In general, we found that the contribution of biological interchange between the QTP and other hotspots of biodiversity has not been sufficiently studied to date. Finally, we suggest that the biological consequences of the uplift of the QTP would be best understood using a meta-analysis approach, encompassing studies on a variety of organisms (plants and animals) from diverse habitats (forests, meadows, rivers), and thermal belts (montane, subalpine, alpine, nival). Since the species diversity in the QTP region is better documented for some organismic groups than for others, we suggest that baseline taxonomic work should be promoted.

The role of the uplift of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau for the evolution of Tibetan biotas

http://reviverestore.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/LernerHawaiianHoneycreepersCurrBiol2011.pdf

Multilocus Resolution of Phylogeny and Timescale in the Extant Adaptive Radiation of Hawaiian Honeycreepers

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/auk.2010.127.1.4

Heather R. L. Lerner

Papers

Multilocus Resolution of Phylogeny and Timescale in the Extant Adaptive Radiation of Hawaiian Honeycreepers

Prospects for the use of Next-Generation Sequencing Methods in Ornithology