New insights into New World biogeography: an integrated view from the phylogeny of blackbirds, cardinals, sparrows, tanagers, warblers, and allies

Understanding the biogeographic origins and temporal sequencing of groups within a region or of lineages within an ecosystem can yield important insights into evolutionary dynamics and ecological processes. Fifty years ago, Ernst Mayr generated comprehensive—if limited—inferences about the origins of the New World avifaunas, including the importance of pre-Isthmian dispersal between North and South America. Since then, methodological advances have improved our ability to address many of the same questions, but the phylogenies upon which such analyses should be based have been incompletely sampled or fragmentary. Here, we report a near-species-level phylogeny of the diverse (~832 species) New World clade Emberizoidea—the group that includes the familiar sparrows, cardinals, blackbirds, wood-warblers, tanagers, and their close relatives—to our knowledge the largest essentially complete (≥95%) phylogenetic hypothesis for any group of organisms. Biogeographic analyses based on this tree sug...