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Dryad

Data from: On the Biogeography of Centipeda: A Species Tree Diffusion Approach

Cite this dataset

Nylinder, Stephan et al. (2013). Data from: On the Biogeography of Centipeda: A Species Tree Diffusion Approach [Dataset]. Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.69329

Abstract

The deserts of Australia together constitute one of the world’s largest continuous arid zones, where precipitation is low and access to water limited and/or sometimes restricted to temporal and unpredictable flooding. In this environment, a wide variety of plants and animals have evolved, many of which are morphologically adapted to ephemeral water and fire regimes. Reconstructing the biogeographic history of groups present in such 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. Our analysis applies 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 ITS for the Asteraceae, we show how the evolution of Centipeda correlates with the temporal increase of aridity in the arid zone since the Pliocene. Geographic estimates of ancestral species show a consistent pattern of speciation of early lineages in the Lake Eyre region, with a division in more northerly and southerly groups since approximately 840 ka. Summarising the geographic slices of species trees at timing of latest speciation event (~20 ka), indicates no presence of the genus in Australia west of the combined desert belt of the Nullabor Plain, the Great Victoria Desert, the Gibson Desert, and the Great Sandy Desert, or beyond the main continental shelf of Australia. The result indicates all western occurrences of the genus to be a result of recent dispersal, rather than ancient vicariance. This study contributes to our understanding of the spatiotemporal processes shaping the flora of the arid zone, and offers a significant improvement in inference of ancestral areas for any organismal group distributed where it remains difficult to describe geography in terms of discrete areas.

Usage notes

Location

New Zealand
Australia