Data from: Maple phylogeny and biogeography inferred from phylogenomic data

Acer (the maple genus) is one of the diverse tree genera in the Northern
Hemisphere with about152 species, most of which are in eastern Asia. There
are roughly a dozen of species in Europe/western Asia and a dozen in North
America. Several phylogenetic studies of Acer have been conducted since
1998, but none have provided a satisfactory resolution for basal
relationships among sections of Acer. Here we report the first
well-resolved phylogeny of Acer based on DNA sequences of over 500 nuclear
loci generated using the anchored hybrid enrichment method and explore the
implications of the robust phylogeny for Acer systematics and
biogeography. Our phylogenetic results support the most recent taxonomic
treatment of Acer by de Jong with some modifications; section Pentaphylla
may be expanded to include section Trifoliata, and A. yangbiense may be
included in section Lithocarpa. Sections Spicata, Negundo, Arguta, and
Palmata form a clade sister to the rest of the genus where sections Glabra
and Parviflora comprise the first clade followed by section Macrantha,
sections Ginnala, Lithocarpa, Indivisa, sections Platanoidea and
Macrophylla, section Rubra, section Acer, and section Pentaphylla.
Monotypic sections Glabra and Macrophylla in North America are sister to
the Japanese section Parviflora and Eurasian section Platanoidea,
respectively. Ancestral area inferences using S-DIVA (statistical
dispersal and vicariance analysis) and DEC (dispersal and extinction
cladogenesis) methods suggest that Asia might be the most likely ancestral
area of Acer as proposed by Wolfe and Tanai and molecular dating using
BEAST (Bayesian evolutionary analysis by sampling trees) indicate that
section diversifications of Acer might have completed largely in the late
Eocene and the intercontinental disjunctions of Acer between eastern Asia
and eastern North America formed mostly in the Miocene.