Data and Code in Simuation and Case Study

Phylogenetic signals are widely used in the ecological and evolutionary research area. Trait data used to detect phylogenetic signals can be continuous or discrete. Existing indices are either designed for continuous variables or for discrete variables, but not both. Moreover, most existing methods could only perform phylogenetic detection for each trait separately. Here, we developed a method, called M statistic, to detect the phylogenetic signals in continuous traits, discrete traits, and combinations of multiple traits. We compared the performance of our new approach with existing commonly used indices using simulated continuous data. The results showed that our method is not inferior to the existing methods. It also performed well in handling discrete variables and multi-variable combinations. Then we used the trait data of turtles (Testudines) to demonstrate the utility of our new method. We provided an R package called “phylosignalDB” to facilitate all calculations.