On the Biogeography of Centipeda: A Species Tree Diffusion Approach

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 IT...