Environmental heterogeneity is considered as one of the main drivers of habitat specialization and niche evolution among tropical plant lineages, and local scale habitat specialization promotes niche differentiation among sister taxa. In this study, we examined the degree to which habitat specialization lead to niche differentiation across the distribution range of a given species using five species of the family Myristicaceae native to Western Ghats, India as an example. In the Western Ghats, Myristicaceae species occur in two main habitat types, namely freshwater swamps (flooded habitat), and terra-firme forest (non-flooded habitat) distributed across a seasonal flooding gradient. First, we reconstructed the evolutionary history of flooded habitat specialization among global and Western Ghats Myristicaceae by mapping flooded habitat association and traits conferring flood tolerance (example: aerial roots) on a dated phylogeny. Then we investigated climatic niche differences among lineages occupying flooded and terra-firme habitats using occurrence data and environmental variables. Our analysis revealed swampy habitat occurrence as the probable ancestral state with subsequent speciation events leading to adaptation to non-swampy habitats. We also show that traits conferring flood tolerance have evolved independently several times during the evolution of Myristicaceae. Furthermore, phylogenetically distantly related Myristicaceae taxa occupying different habitats (flooded and terra-firme habitat) in Western Ghats show significant niche divergence. Overall, the repeated gain of swampy habitat specialization and associated morphological traits and evidence for habitat associated climatic niche divergence among Myristicaceae taxa suggest that seasonal flooding may have been an important driver of ecological diversification in this primitive plant family.

This datasets contains all the data used in the paper "The flooded habitat adaptation, niche differentiation and evolution of Myristicaceae trees in the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot in India"

You can use the data to reproduce all the analysis, figures, and tables in the article.

All the analysis were done in R statistical software (http://www.r-project.org/) 2013.

Data files (.nex, fasta, tre, .XML)

1 .tre file

infile.nex.conFinal.tre: Bayesian phylogeny of Western Ghats Myristicaceae

myconsensWGMY2.tre: Maximum Likelihood phylogeny of Western Ghats Myristicaceae

MBGlobal.tre: Bayesian phylogeny of Global Myristicaceae

MyristicaDated.tre: BEAST dated phylogeny of global Myristicaceae

2 .nex file

MBConcatAllignMyri3: MrBayes input file for Western Ghats Myristicaceae

MBConcatAllignMyriML: Maximum Likelihood input file for Western Ghats Myristicaceae

ConcatenatedMyristicaceaeFinalGarli: Maximum Likelihood analysis input allignment file for Global Myristicaceae

MyristicaceaeMBFull: MrBayes analysis input allignment file for Global Myristicaceae

3 .fasta file

Individual gene allignment files

Myrisricaceae2_psbA-trnH: psbA-Trnh

Myristicaceae_18s: 18s

Myristicaceae_accD: accD

Myristicaceae_matK: matK

Myristicaceae_ndhf: ndhf

Myristicaceae_Rbcl: Rbcl

Myristicaceae_rpob: rpob

Myristicaceae_rpoC1: rpoC1

Myristicaceae_Trnf: Trnf

Myristicaceae_Trnl: Trnl

4  .XML file

BEASTMyristicaceae: BEAST analysis input allignment file for Global Myristicaceae