Biogeography of Otoba and Myristicaceae

Focused clade-based approaches are important for understanding Neotropical plant biogeography. Applying comparative methods to well-resolved phylogenies allows researchers to establish biogeographic patterns that may not be discernible at the community level or within very large clades (e.g., all angiosperms). The genus Otoba (Myristicaceae), a nutmeg relative that occurs throughout the humid northern Neotropics, comprises twelve species are distributed from Nicaragua to Brazil, with the highest species richness in the Choco and western Amazonia. They grow in many mesic habitats, including lowland tropical rainforest (both terra firme and floodplain), premontane forest, and cloud forest, spanning a broad elevational range (i.e., 0-2500 m) that includes the highest elevation occurrence in Myristicaceae, and are one of the ten most abundant genera in western Amazonia. Otoba's broad ecological tolerance and presence across both the Andes and the Isthmus of Panama allow us to use it as a system to understand the roles of dispersal and niche evolution in the establishment of a widespread, ecologically important group. There has been limited molecular phylogenetic research into Myristicaceae, and no previous research focused on Otoba. In one of the first target sequence captured-based phylogenomic analyses that relies exclusively on DNA from herbarium specimens collected in the wet tropics, we resolve the phylogeny of Otoba using the universal probe set Angiosperms353.