Data from: Using dozens of species in a regional comparative phylogeography of freshwater taxa

Phylogeography was originally intended to be a comparative exercise, with important landscape and biological histories becoming apparent from the combined data of many species, however single taxon studies have predominated. Now more than ever there is an impetus for phylogeography to become more comparative as sequencing becomes easier and cheaper, and with the development of new analytical techniques that test specific biogeographic hypotheses by considering data from many species simultaneously. We investigated hypotheses regarding the strong influence of river basins, supra-basin biogeographic frontiers and regional climate change on the phylogeographic patterns of freshwater species by using data from 33 species of fish and crustacean from Queensland, eastern Australia. We employed standard single-species analyses, such as haplotype networks and AMOVAs, and multi-species hierarchical Approximate Bayesian Computation analyses. We found a complex situation in which drainage divides proved to be influential for most species, and in some cases particular drainage divides hinted at large-scale biogeographic patterns, likely driven by refugia linked to past climate change. Deep lineages were identified within more than half of the species, and analyses indicate that many of them could relate to a single influential period of climate change within the last few million years. This highlights a link to mathematical theory in that not only is there chaos (e.g., the coalescent) within the seemingly orderly (evolution), there can also be order within the apparent confusion of species patterns if enough species are considered.