Invited Lecture to Biogeography class in Texas A&M University

Bridging the gap among community phylogenetics, biogeography and macroevolution: moving from patterns to process

Outline

Detect patterns of biodiversity distribution essential in Community ecology and Biogeography studies, since patterns allows test hypotheses and search for the processes generating those patterns. However, this pattern-oriented approach have not shown adequate to understand the underlying processes in a given assemblage, since similar patterns can be generated by totally different evolutionary processes, and the contrary, very different patterns could be generated by the same ecological/macroevolutionary process.

In this presentation I will show how we can improve our capacity to detect unanbiguous patterns and processes generating the distribution of biological diversity, with a special focus on the analysis of two very popular metrics used in biogeography and conservation studies: Phylogenetic Diversity and Phylogenetic Endemism.

I will demonstrate that by ignoring deep-time events that occurred in the evolutionary history of lineages lead to wrong conclusions about the processes affecting the assembly of communities and biogeographical regions. Further, I will propose a methodological solution to this problem that will pave the way to the development of a new family of metrics of phylogenetic diversity able to differentiate the effects of two main processes responsible to shape the distribution of life on earth: historical dispersal and diversification.