On the biogeography of Centipeda: a species-tree diffusion approach.

ABSTRACT: Reconstructing the biogeographic history of groups present in continuous arid landscapes is challenging due to the difficulties in defining discrete areas for analyses, and even more so when species largely overlap both in terms of geography and habitat preference. In this study, we use a novel approach to estimate ancestral areas for the small plant genus Centipeda. We apply continuous diffusion of geography by a relaxed random walk where each species is sampled from its extant distribution on an empirical distribution of time-calibrated species-trees. Using a distribution of previously published substitution rates of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) for Asteraceae, we show how the evolution of Centipeda correlates with the temporal increase of aridity in the arid zone since the Plio

SUBMITTER: Nylinder S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3926304 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature