Reconstructing the Geography of Speciation from Contemporary Biodiversity Data

AbstractInferring the geographic mode of speciationcould help reveal the evolutionary and ecological mechanisms that underlie the generation of biodiversity. Comparative methodshave sought to reconstruct the geographic speciationhistory of clades, using data on phylogeny and species geographic ranges. However, inference from comparative methodshas been limited by uncertainty over whether contemporary biodiversitydata retain the historic signal of speciation. We constructed a process-based simulation model to determine the influence of speciationmode and postspeciation range evolution on current biodiversitypatterns. The simulations suggest that the signal of speciationhistory remains detectable in species distributionsand phylogeny, even when species ranges have evolved substantially through time. We extracted this signal by using a combination of summary statisticsthat had good power to distinguish speciationmodes and then used these statistics to infer the speciationhistory of 30 plant and a...