Museomics for reconstructing historical floristic exchanges: Divergence of Stone Oaks across Wallacea

Natural history collections and tropical tree diversity are treasure troves of biological and evolutionary information, but its accessibility is impeded by several properties. DNA in historical specimens generally occurs in a highly fragmented state, complicating the recovery of high-grade genetic material for scientific studies. Our understanding of hyperdiverse, wide-spread tree assemblages suffers from patchy information on distributions, phenology and paucity of diagnostic characters. This prohibits rapid identification and the strengthening of taxonomic frameworks and in turn, delay the application of downstream conservation actions. Congruently, a sizeable component of botanical collections are sterile, eluding identification and slowing down progress in systematic treatments. With rapid advances in genomics and bioinformatic approaches to biodiversity research, museomics is emerging as a new field breathing life into natural collections built up over centuries. Using MIGseq (...